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"Careful, considered, poised and rich shimmerings, there's something gutless, something scarily elegant about No-Man, like a train screaming into a tunnel with the sound ripped out. Like a silent scream hovering in the air. There is something earthless and removed about them. Something slight and undeveloped, like songs half-heard when tuning round the dial. But in the midst of the haunting desolation and bleakness, an occasional heavy human hand, thick as forest darkness opens its palm. As if this is all there can ever be. A simple singular acknowledgement. As if such a slight unbowing is the most gaping soul-baring we can bear. Few of the songs begin or end, simply rise from nothing and nowhere and fall back, sighing, again. As if the piercing sight of life itself is too keen to bear. This is walking on the shadowed side of the hill, this is feeling the laying touch of a cool hand.
There's something about the voice of Tim Bowness, so golden rich, honeyed and seductive that disguises the icemaiden, absinthe, glass shard, glacier blue within. In the centre of the album is an apparently slight little yearn of a love song Riverrun which achieves some form and solidity, little cascades of tunes tumbling into a wide sinuous melody, lyrics uncluttered as ever. There seems warmth enough to rest in, in this song at least, of the No-Man journey. Night Sky, Sweet Earth too, glows like a town seen through the night but always, always passed by. The velvet dark closing round again.
As I wrote this the winter sun found its way into the room and, for a moment, blinded me. This CD from No-Man is equally intense and brilliant: equally distant and otherworldly."
- Wendy Cook, THIS IS NOT TV
"Ak sa vratime na zaciatok devatdesiatych rokov, zistime, ze v tanecnej hudbe "nesliapalo" prilis vela kapiel, ktore remixy ci verzie svojich skladieb pomenovali 'Bartok', 'Mahler' ci 'Yves' a ktore by hladeli s obdivom ako na Kraftwerk a Ultravox, tak aj na folkrockovych pesnickarov a hipisakov. (Vlastne mi napadaju len The Orb a Shamen.) A tym je o rafinovanej popmusic britskeho dua No-Man povedane ak nie vsetko, tak aspon mnohe. V sucasnosti uz No-Man's dancemusic, do ktorej kedysi obliekli svoje hity 'Only Baby', 'Days In The Trees' ci 'Painting Paradise' nemaju spolocne nic. Opustili dokonca i formu akejsi housemusic pre nehouse-istov, o ktoru sa (a nie nesikovne) pokusili napr. spolu s Robertom Frippom a Lizou Gerrard (ex-Dead Can Dance) na albume 'Flowermouth'. Ostala "len" sila a neosuchanost melodii a textov, v ambiente skoro az principialne eliminovatelna strucnost (nech ziju vynimky!) a charakteristicky, mierne sladkobolny vokal, na ktory je mozne zvyknut si rovnako ako na spev Bryana Ferryho. Album mimoriadne osviezila coververzia Donovanovho 'River Songu', ozvu sa aj elektrifikovane husle Bena Colemana, hrajuceho neclena kapely, a violoncelo Richarda Felixa. Skratka to, cim sa Tim Bownes a Steven Wilson prezentuju na 'Speak', by sme mohli oznacit za moderny folk, prip. ambient-folk. Ako No-Man uvadzaju v booklete, ide o 12 piesni z rokov '88-'89, z ktorych pre toto CD pouzili povodne demo-verzie z osemstopoveho magnetaku, nanovo ich naspievali a instrumentaciu zmenili len nepatrne. Len v pripade dvoch piesni ide o uplne nove verzie. Musim uznat, ze je to zo strany firmy Materiali Sonori velmi originalny (a pre mna ako fanusika velmi prijemny) sposob uvedenia kapely na "novy trh". Sice je mysleny trh taliansky, ale co je nove tam, bude u nas nove az niekolko rokov po zostarnuti, takze zacat je vlastne uz teraz neskoro."
- Daniel Balaz, WEGART
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"The supernaturally beautiful 'Speak' - a collection of No-Man secret songs recorded at the close of the '80s - overwhelms with its secrets. Even more finely-modelled and fine-art than 'Flowermouth', with all of pop's fragrance but none of its bluster, it's like being drawn in through the frame of an enormous luxuriant oil painting. And then being left there in that endlessly unfurling landscape to marvel at the sweep of purpling evening sky and the scents on the breeze.
Thirteen years old, it could've been recorded yesterday: or now, freshly created every time you listen to it. It's an album to get blissfully lost in, opening up like an infinite dome or a giant sky. Everywhere there are gorgeous violins (blurring even the clouds in French Tree Terror Suspect) and damaskine folds of shaped sound, distant forest percussion, shimmering guitars and marimbas mingling with noises like stars falling. And Tim's voice is at its most up- close and seductive, stroking your ears... yet distracted, perfectly focussed on the motions but with its attention immersed somewhere else.
Greedily aesthetic and romantic to its core, 'Speak' is set within beautiful natural solitude. Or within dreams of it. Every way you turn, there's a new texture to entrance you, a new ring of moonbeam guitar, a new fragment of vocal rhapsody curving the air. And even if those fragments Tim sings about seem fleeting, seem doomed to fail, the act of standing there and letting the feelings in seems to answer a hunger.
A cover of Nick Drake's apocalyptic signoff, Pink Moon, slants down like light through stained-glass windows. Riverrun, with whispering joy, cries out in fleeting wonder to an invisible lover; while another cover - Donovan's River Song - chills with its English pastoral beauty, sheathed over by ice. The serene lament of Heaven's Break most explicitly embraces loss as part of this landscape. Tim sings "she would stare into the sun, / screaming loud in summer heat. / She would fly away from him, / solid melting into sky," while an unexpected plaintive harmonica weaves a rough counterpoint to the mathematical cascades of Steve Reich marimbas, the gusting electronic warmth and the bell-like touches of guitar.
But then, "I hear no screams - I stand apart..." - something's not quite right. Darkness presses softly, subliminally, at the heart of this solitary paradise. In Life With Picasso, Tim can impassively watch a drowning struggle in the water; entranced by the motion, but detached from the reality of pain or of a life ending. But the talking-drum rhythm of Iris Murdoch Cut Me Down taps at the attention as if trying to wake you from the eerily lovely Wilson landscape of radio whine and scratched, backwards piano notes like tiny rips in the sky. Tim keens "the golden light is everywhere", touched by fear and incomprehension - the reverie is slipping out of control, or Tim himself is slipping into a trance from which there's no returning, or not in the form in which he entered. And in the streetlamp balladry of Night Sky Sweet Earth, Tim the aesthete stands in a lane and drinks in the colours and scents of a lush autumn evening; but is gradually realising that "you talk to me, but I cannot hear..."
Increasingly, 'Speak' is a retreat that turns in on itself. Dissatisfaction and growing awareness subtly colours the dreaming - like the viewer pictured "alone by the window... alway reaching, reaching out," in the little tone-painting abstractions of Death And Dodgson's Dreamchild. Restlessly drifting between its opulent romantic images and a dawning feeling of gaps in this sensual world, Curtain Dream frets "I've opened my eyes / and seen there's nothing left but doubt," while a guitar lulls and disturbs, strange notes flung into the chords like a change in the wind. And the sparse, brooding Ballet Beast, among delicate strums of cello, decides "there must be more, more than this nothing, more than this waiting... / more than this yearning, this searching for something to say..."
'Speak''s little miracle is how it pinpoints that disturbing point where fantasy - the retreat into beauty - and the pull of the world outside meet and struggle, soundlessly, over the course of a life. 'Flowermouth''s is how it captures with minimal indulgence the hallucinatory beauty of real, personal disasters and the romance of despair. And both are ruinously embraceable - the thorns and the wounds, the seductions and revelations - that you just can't live without, or could never bring yourself to escape. You'll never leave. Never. Not while all of this can come through you. Music for expanding spirits with at least one foot of clay."
- Dann Chinn, MISFIT CITY
NO WARNING
- in preparation
IO PAGES
- in preparation
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