Noah and the Whale Craft Album of Nuanced Pop

“I’ll come back to you in a year or so / And I’ll rebuild, ready to become / The person you believed in.” It’s been a little longer than a year since Charlie Fink, lead singer of British indie band Noah and the Whale, forecast his triumphant return from post-break-up breakdowns, and he fulfills his promise in striking form on the band’s latest album. On “Last Night On Earth,” Fink turns his eyes up from his navel and onto the lives of carefully constructed characters longing to break free from limited existences. He depicts his characters with care, and, in setting them on the boundaries of freedom and their old lives, creates blissful portraits of longing and unbounded joy which his band builds into irresistible, if occasionally trite, pop songs.

Fink and his bandmates have traded the heavy drums, dusty guitars and dolorous vocals of their last album for light-footed drum machines, bright synths, and slightly less dolorous vocals of “Last Night on Earth.” Fink can sound down on his luck even when delivering a corny line like “Tonight’s the kind of night when everything could change,” but the darkness of his delivery contrasts with the uplift of the melodies to provide an undercurrent of receding pain to every hopeful tale of change. “Life is Life” builds from synthesizers reminiscent of The Who into anthemic cries of “He’s gonna change / Gonna change his ways” over the throb of a bass synth.

The band’s new taste for anthems is prevalent throughout the album. On their lead single, Noah and the Whale demonstrated an astute knowledge of popular music: no chorus is catchier than one with spelt lyrics. Yes, the infectious refrain of “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” would have made Fergie proud, even if it isn’t shorthand for a bizarre sex act. Before the band joins together to sing the refrain over the outro’s sinuous, sustained guitar, Fink sings, “On my last night on earth / I pay a high price / To have no regrets and be done with my life” again situating the pop abandon of a truly masterful song at a boundary of loss and potential. This lyrical and musical move of glancing backwards to refresh in the listener’s mind a source of tension before delivering a powerful release serves to imbue the songs with true depths of emotion.

Unfortunately, all the talk of boundaries occasionally seeps into the band’s music. Songs like “Waiting For My Chance to Come” reach for similar heights of hope and easy excitement as “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.,” supporting lines like “I’m just waiting for my chance to come” with twelve-string guitar, the steady pulse of shifting power chords and warm dollops of Fender Rhodes redolent of Tom Petty. Though pleasant, the song feels limited and frustrated, as if it wants to be let loose but is somehow trapped by the band’s preoccupations. The group falls prey to contrivance again on “Give It All Back” whose cloying xylophone chords cast the song’s nostalgia as immature longing.

Not surprisingly, then, the album succeeds most stunningly on the slower numbers that deal more directly with themes of uncertainty and reflection than with abandoned freedom. “The Line,” easily the album’s best track, begins with a quavering bed of synthesizers and slow drum machine before tightly wound guitars and bass launch it into a strutting yet gentle beat which delicately contrasts with Fink’s timid delivery. The chorus releases all of the build of the verse in a gently cathartic chord pattern driven by a thrumming synthesizer and Fink’s portrait of a struggling relationship. The song’s most beautiful lyric provides, as many of the best on the album do, an intimate glimpse of a character reaching her boundaries: “She fixes her make-up / Treading lightly on the floor / Hoping he won’t wake up / As she makes her way towards the door.” The intricate rhymes are soothingly delivered over a mournfully cracked violin, and the song is a delicate and brooding pop masterpiece that reaches heights of poignancy at which their heavy-handed previous release only gestured.

At its best, “Last Night On Earth” is an unexpected and triumphant celebration that refuses to forget the very conditions that can make triumph seem so unexpected. Though the band’s preoccupations can restrain them to sounding trite when they mean to sound reckless and liberated, their nuanced exploration of the space between the pain of loss and the joy of moving on is adeptly serviced by their irresistible musicianship and their commitment to rebuilding, staying hopeful, and encompassing all of those feelings in the ever-prevalent medium of pop music.

—Staff writer Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey can be reached at bhafrey@college.harvard.edu.