Throw yourself from the car as it takes that tight mountain corner, tumbling down the night-time slopes as brakes squeal and distorted voices cry out behind you. Keep moving; stagger through the woods, bruised and disorientated until there, somewhere ahead, comes the sound of drunken laughter; of a saloon door swinging wide and music seeping out. Then, emerge before some smoke-lit roadhouse, and through the neon glow and sheen of spilled beer you will see them, Noire, taking the stage, completing the tableau. In this place, you see, atmosphere is everything.
“I guess that’s the most important thing when we’re writing – atmosphere,” Jessica Mincher explains over a shaky connection from Berlin. “For me, anyway. When I listen to my favourite music it puts me into a certain mood … like, I’m not that interested in what’s being said. I know that’s probably bad, it’s just mainly how it’s making me feel. Initially, that’s what I look for, and when we’re writing I’m thinking of the imagery. Not just how it sounds, but how it looks. With Billy it’s quite different, but I want to create a certain atmosphere.”
Micher and Billy James are two sides of the coin that is Noire, a Sydney-based indie-dream-rock band who are currently enjoying a strong response in Europe. Perhaps that’s unsurprising – there is, after all, something distinctively European about their smoke softened sound; about the strange, winding paths that their songs take.
They might list their influences as ranging from Mazzy Star to Nick Cave, but they could tell you that their career has been shaped by the entirety of European music and cinema – by Truffaut, and Godard, and Renoir, and Akerman, and Gainsbourg, and Aznavour – and you’d believe them. They just have that cool factor; that hard to articulate sense of suave, considered sexuality. It’s there in the music video for their song ‘Baby Blue’, as they stalk about the place in silhouetted profile, and it’s there in their live performances, as they strum their instruments and wander around the stage.
We usually play bars and stuff in Sydney, and I don’t know if our stuff really suits a rowdy bar.
So yeah, it makes sense that they are connecting overseas – that their songs are finding a home, and transforming a DIY two piece into a genuine cultural sensation. Indeed, the pair are becoming so well-regarded that they recently found themselves achieving an enviable career side-quest; performing at David Lynch’s Silencio bar in Paris. It was a remarkable moment for the pair. Not only because of their comprehensive love of auteur cinema – listen to any of their songs and you can’t help but give in to the cinematic seduction – but because of the flavours of venue and the audience there.
“It was amazing,” Mincher says. “The smoking room is in this glass box full of dead trees; the ash trays are on the branches. The design is amazing. It’s so dark, but you can kind of see everything. I think we might get better reception there than we do back home. I don’t know, it kind of seems like everybody just listens, they dance and get it a bit more. Maybe it’s just the atmosphere we were in, but it was an amazing night.”
“The crowd seems a little bit more receptive, maybe,” James suggests. “If we’re playing on a mixed lineup, they might listen some more.”
“We usually play bars and stuff in Sydney,” Micher adds, “and I don’t know if our stuff really suits a rowdy bar. It isn’t that loud; you can’t go crazy and dance. So it’s probably more the places we’re playing at home maybe as well.”
And yet if there’s any justice in the world, the band’s fates will soon change when they return to tour their debut album, Some Kind Of Blue. The record has been years in the making, and its first single, ‘Real Cool’, is a gorgeous, mysterious entry into their world (think the musical lovechild of Lynch and Paris, Texas helmer Wim Wenders).
Having sequestered themselves away from the world to get these songs recorded, it is surprising to learn that there isn’t a sweep of half-finished songs littered in their wake. Noire are methodical; the kind of band that can craft a song all the way from unlife to sound, precisely and particularly forming their sonic structures along the way. The duo are not ready to rush anything – not prepared to throw any song out into the world that they are not totally proud of.
We generally finish all the songs that we start, if we like them
“We generally finish all the songs that we start, if we like them,” Mincher says. “We’re not a band that writes 100 songs for an album. We probably wrote 15. We spent a lot of time on all of them, and then got rid of the ones that didn’t really seem to fit. We really worked on the ideas that we fell in love with.
“We were just talking about how we want to start writing [new material] while we’re on this trip. I want the new stuff to sound like when a hot tin roof expands, or when a fan is spinning in the middle of nowhere and you’re sweating in the heat. That’s how I think of writing music: how does it look and feel? What’s the situation it could fit into? I love listening to music in the car, and we go on loads of roadtrips. When you write a song, I guess it’s about a destination that you’re never really going to get to. You’ll never really get to the end.”
Some Kind Of Blue is out Friday September 29 through Spunk.
