Biography
"Berlin's answer to Beck."
Noel Maurice has been compared to a lot of different people - Beck, the Femmes, "Tom Wait's younger brother", and so on - but really what marks him out is that he doesn't after all sound exactly like anyone else.
Although you could agree with the artist´s definition of the music as antipop/ alternative pop, you could also go on to say that it´s rooted in blues, that it's redolent of the folk tradition, that it uses a traditonal instrumental line-up of guitar, (sometimes double) bass and drums; but there's something that throws everything ever so slightly off-kilter, takes things out of their usual context and shifts them just a little before putting them back again, so that you'll have to listen back to it to try to hear what it was that made it different.
NM has said: “Somehow I found myself trying my best to write mainstream, straight songs. But at some time the wiring in my head must have gone funny, and I can’t quite make them completely normal”.
There’s definitely a strong aspect of using a song as a place to create an emotional landscape and then, with the setting created, to tell a story.
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