I’m struggling to choose the correct analogy here. I can’t decide if Nick Noon makes music that feels like a trip down a sonic rabbit hole, sucking the listener in and delivering them to a place that is both wonderfully unique yet slightly familiar. Or if songs like his latest “Who Needs Who” are like a musical onion, revealing a different musical flavour, genre, sound and style with each layer peeled back. Maybe he is both – a sonic onion hole, if you will. Hang on, I’ve gone too far. Let me start again.
“Who Needs Who” is one of those tracks that instantly engages with the listener—the country vibe is infectious, the unfussy beats joyous and jaunty, the slashes of guitar cool and spacious, and the groove effortless. But it is when you start to dig deeper down into the rabbit hole, when you peel back ever more layers of the onion skin, that the real deftness and beauty of the song reveals itself.
What first greets you is a cool rockabilly beat. Look beyond that, and you find an earlier country-rock groove. But fall deeper/peel further (sorry, I have got lost in my own analogies), and you see further layers of 90’s indie guitars, even no small hint of punked-up, singer-songwriter hybrid that is simultaneously slightly nostalgic and the sound of the here-and-now. On top of that, there are bluesy salvos and scintillating solos and then the sort of vocal delivery that you can’t help but sing along to whilst punching the air.
It is hard to see anything that Nick Noon has left out.
But do you want to know the best thing about this song? The question that it poses before you have even dropped the needle on the track. Just look at the title of the song and think about it in context of the image on the cover. Socio-political debate in 3, 2, 1….Go!
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