Like their near namesake, Joe Gideon and the Shark, Noah & The Whale are a London-based ensemble with a nagging Antipodean sensibility, boasting sizable doses of the Go-Betweens’ wry melancholia, the Dirty Three’s duende, and even a whiff of The Triffids’ hobbled waltzes in tunes like ‘I Have Nothing’.
Wes Anderson fans to a man, they also come from a long line of enlightened miserablists: Red House Painters, Palace Brothers, Belle & Sebastian. But there’s majesty in moments like the panoramic title track, suggesting the scope and scale of The Decemberists or even early Waterboys, while lachrymose brass and a Neil Young guitar break give songs like ‘My Broken Heart’ a crucial heft. ‘Stranger’, meanwhile, evokes the seedy regret of the first one night stand undertaken in the wake of a man’s great heartbreak, and ‘My Door Is Always Open’ might be the best C&W lament Bonnie Billy never wrote.
But it isn’t all gloom and doom. The single ‘Blue Skies’ is downcast but also anthemic. A brace of ornate instrumentals enact the band’s own version of the rites of spring. The wonderfully batty ‘Love Of An Orchestra’ comes off as somewhere between Van’s Into The Music and a Moonies gathering. In short, they’re the kind of act we might have cried out for in the dark days of the last great depression circa 1986. Half the time The First Days of Spring evokes a very old England of scarves and winter coats and CS Lewis acolytes off to Hogwarts for the new term, the other half it’s locked in the most desperate of Melbourne bedsits looking for a sniff of the cork. Intriguing stuff.