The First Days Of Spring

I hated ‘5 Years Time’. As popular as the indie anthem may have been back in 2007, I never bought in to the hype. The sunshine and lollipops approach made me feel a little squeamish and thus I lost any interest for the band I may have harboured and discarded them to the doldrums of my iTunes library. Fast forward to this summer and I begrudgingly was forced to watch them as they headlined the Y-Not festival. Needless to say, I was swiftly eating humble pie as Noah and the Whale played through The First Days of Spring.

A quick backdrop to the concept behind the second album: following the success of Peaceful the World Lays Me Down Laura Marling left the band to pursue a successful solo career in tow with frontman Charlie Fink who acted as her producer / love interest. Some while after Marling’s success the couple split and subsequently Fink began writing The First Days of Spring; a musical companion to his emotional journey of recovery.

The title track opens the album and is the perfect prerequisite for what is a monumental piece of art. It introduces Fink’s melancholy and simultaneously flaunts a truly haunting mix of strings, guitar and percussion. ‘Our Window’ and the distressing ‘I Have Nothing’ reveal the depths of Fink’s troubles highlighting his isolation and sadness, both seem refreshingly genuine and not manufactured for the sake of the album.

For a truly groundbreaking album a band must possess an identifiable, individual approach to the instrumentation. The First Days of Spring juxtaposes clean guitars with soaring piano segments to exquisitely complement the desolate character of Fink’s lyrical concepts. Where needed the instrumentation is tampered with to keep things fresh, as seen with ‘Love of an Orchestra’ which is up-tempo and features a string section and choir.

As the album reaches it’s finale Fink attempts shift the focus from a love lost to that of new horizons. ‘Stranger’ is a moving piece on Fink’s first romantic encounter since the maligned break up and the emotional consequences of such, reaching such lows as ‘everything I love has gone away’. Before the track ends, there is a distinct change in musical styling in lyrics. Fink manages to convey some kind of emotional epiphany. Without a doubt this is the highlight of the album. ‘Blue Skies’ declares Fink’s desire for optimism and as such the music changes in approach. What impresses most is that NATW retain the quality from the opening tracks despite this adjustment. ‘Blue Skies’ mixes the albums trademark guitar-piano fusion, adds a smidgen of brass and some rather nice vocal harmonies and the result is something more uplifting.

Melancholic musicians either make masterpieces or self-obsessed travesties, betraying any sense of musical rooting in some misguided notion that a dramatic musical upheaval will convey their pain. Charlie Fink has produced the former. Although the listener can feel unnerved by the voyeuristic experience of listening to Fink’s journey from desolation to enforced optimism, it is worth persevering and results in an incredibly moving experience. Very rarely can music evoke feelings of distress or joy; let alone both on one album.