NOIRE — Some Kind Of Blue (September 29, 2017) 
••• “We usually play bars and stuff in Sydney, and I don’t know if our stuff really suits a rowdy bar.”
••• “We generally finish all the songs that we start, if we like them.”
ζ→ Soaking in bathtubs and tributes to AIR: NOIRE run us through their debut LP Some Kind Of Blue
ζ→ A band we’ve had our eyes on for quite some time now, NOIRE have fully blossomed into something irreplaceably beautiful on their debut album Some Kind Of Blue.
ζ→ As a prizewinner in our Needle in the Hay competition, we’ll happily say that NOIRE’s Some Kind Of Blue is one of our favourite albums to drop this year.
Dark Was The Night
ζ→ Dark Was The Night was the name of Ry Cooder’s instrumental in the movie Paris, Texas which was based off Blind Willie Johnson’s song, Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground – possibly one of the most beautiful songs you’ll hear. I always loved that title and wanted to use it on something.
Location: Sydney, New South West, Australia
Genre: Dream Pop
Album release: September 29, 2017
Record Label: Spunk Records
Duration:
Tracks:
1. Dark Was the Night 3:29
2. Real Cool 3:03
3. Not Feelin’ Good 3:20
4. He’s My Baby 3:16
5. I Saw You at the Store 2:35
6. Baby Blue 4:01
7. Dreamers 2:44
8. Born To Be Blue 3:38
9. Don’t Know Where I’m Going 3:45
Real Cool
ζ→ Real Cool was our tribute to AIR, we love their synths and how immersive their sound can be. We used the CS80 emulator sounds on the whole album but this song really shows off the beauty of that synth!
Not Feelin’ Good
ζ→ I had just started to play guitar and this was the first song I wrote. I’ve since retired! It’s a song to be listened to when driving alone down a highway.
He’s My Baby
ζ→ The music is so beautiful to this one and has a real purity to it, that’s why I loved it straight away when Billy played it to me. And those sweet, sweet guitars! Basically our writing process out at the farm was to drink coffee, pick flowers and soak in bathtubs — most nights I would put on Mazzy Star while I lay in the bath for hours and they were the inspiration for this song title.
I Saw You At The Store
ζ→ Hopefully this song sounds like chips on white butcher’s paper, burnt feet on hot bitumen, wet hair drying in the summer and a small shop in a smaller town.
Baby Blue
ζ→ This track was on our EP but it was the last song we wrote for it and I guess it started the direction the album ended up heading in. The nod to western/country guitars and the bluesy feeling. The track for me looks like barren landscapes and hopefully it has the same feeling of emptiness and loneliness too.
Dreamers
ζ→ Dreamers is my favourite track on the record. While we were working on it, Billy and I drove to Bundaberg in Queensland to see a psychic my mum had gone to. We drove a couple of hours to get there; her house was in the middle of a cane field, with wind chimes blowing on her verandah. She was sitting in a rocking chair out the front waiting for us when we arrived. I recorded the session and sampled some of what she said in the track.
Born To Be Blue
ζ→ We were listening to a lot of ‘60s girl groups, and when we wrote the song we wanted to have a similar feel with the drums and the spoken word verses, like The Shangri~Las (ha).
Don’t Know Where I’m Going
ζ→ As soon as Billy wrote this we knew it sounded like the end of something and we wanted it to be the closing track. It’s New Years Eve, drinking wine, you’ve quit your job, left your house and you’re not too sure what’s next. ζ→ http://hhhhappy.com/
Review
by Jonny Nail | Sep 28, 2017 10:23:AM
••• Sydney~based duo Noire are set to release their debut album, Some Kind of Blue, on September 29th via Spunk Records. Ahead of which, Rolling Stone Australia is hosting an exclusive preview stream of the entire album.
••• Teasingly revealed over the past few months via a pair of singles — the swooning “He’s My Baby” and sparkling “Real Cool” (which vocalist Jessica Mincher unashamedly says serves as “a tribute to Air”) — Some Kind Of Blue blurs the genre-boundaries between spacey synth~laced shoegaze, straight~up indie balladry and even, somewhat unexpectedly, swerves towards something like midnight country rock AM~radio. The latter likely an addition picked up during the writing process, which saw the duo decamp to an isolated farm in rural Queensland, after Mincher attended an inspiring talk from filmmaker Miranda July in early~2016.
••• “She said some incredible things like ‘I continue to forget and remember and forget and remember and forget and remember that I’m free.’”, Mincher recalls. “The next day I quit my job, Billy and I left Sydney and we moved up to a farm in Queensland, with no phone or internet reception for three months to write an album. We set up a make shift studio in the lounge room, next to the fireplace and tried to record something every day.”
••• The big~smoke detachment has also led to a greater sense of sparsity and white~space exposure that both Mincher and guitarist Billy James use to great effect across the LP’s nine tracks. The pair balance their formative pop~ic cool with greater emotive engagement, as both vocal fragility (“Dark Was The Night”) and subtle reverb intricacies (“Dreamers) craft some of the album’s most strikingly powerful moments. At other times, Mincher is porch~based, bluntly documenting her woes to the empty sky (“Don’t Know Where I’m Going”), fantasising of ciggy~smoke filled French night~spots millions of miles away (“Born To Be Blue”) or analysing the simply life far closer to home, as with the enthralling “I Saw You At The Store”, which — somewhat surprisingly for a band once happy to shuffle on the edges of dark~pop — bounces with a Barnett~like sense of storytelling purpose.
••• It’s a sense of positivity that serves as a welcome splash of diversity to Noire’s sound. Something that even surprised the band themselves, with Mincher explaining that “the period before moving to the farm was a really dark time for us and we thought the album would turn out a lot more desperate, but in contrast it created an outlet for us to be more positive about everything.”
••• http://rollingstoneaus.com/
Also:
Written by Adam Norris on Sep 27, 2017
••• http://thebrag.com/noire-baby-blue-some-kind
Label: http://www.spunk.com.au/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NOIREband_
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearenoire/
BIOGRAPHY
••• Spunk Records is proud to announce our latest signing, Sydney~based band NOIRE ~ aka Jessica Mincher (vocals and synth) and Billy James (guitar). Following up their self~released EP Baby Blue in 2015, NOIRE have announced the release of their debut album ‘Some Kind of Blue’, due September 29 via Spunk Records.
••• Growing up in the small regional town of Gympie, QLD before moving to Sydney where they formed in 2014, NOIRE craft dark, melodic and tenderly sculptured pop songs that traverse shoegaze, reverb heavy blues and indie rock.
••• Citing inspiration from Air, Mazzy Star, David Lynch, Wim Wenders and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ‘Some Kind of Blue’ is a cinematic soundscape charting the fluidity of love and loneliness.
ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→
••• “We generally finish all the songs that we start, if we like them.”
ζ→ Soaking in bathtubs and tributes to AIR: NOIRE run us through their debut LP Some Kind Of Blue
ζ→ A band we’ve had our eyes on for quite some time now, NOIRE have fully blossomed into something irreplaceably beautiful on their debut album Some Kind Of Blue.
ζ→ As a prizewinner in our Needle in the Hay competition, we’ll happily say that NOIRE’s Some Kind Of Blue is one of our favourite albums to drop this year.
Dark Was The Night
ζ→ Dark Was The Night was the name of Ry Cooder’s instrumental in the movie Paris, Texas which was based off Blind Willie Johnson’s song, Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground – possibly one of the most beautiful songs you’ll hear. I always loved that title and wanted to use it on something.
Location: Sydney, New South West, Australia
Genre: Dream Pop
Album release: September 29, 2017
Record Label: Spunk Records
Duration:
Tracks:
1. Dark Was the Night 3:29
2. Real Cool 3:03
3. Not Feelin’ Good 3:20
4. He’s My Baby 3:16
5. I Saw You at the Store 2:35
6. Baby Blue 4:01
7. Dreamers 2:44
8. Born To Be Blue 3:38
9. Don’t Know Where I’m Going 3:45
Real Cool
ζ→ Real Cool was our tribute to AIR, we love their synths and how immersive their sound can be. We used the CS80 emulator sounds on the whole album but this song really shows off the beauty of that synth!
Not Feelin’ Good
ζ→ I had just started to play guitar and this was the first song I wrote. I’ve since retired! It’s a song to be listened to when driving alone down a highway.
He’s My Baby
ζ→ The music is so beautiful to this one and has a real purity to it, that’s why I loved it straight away when Billy played it to me. And those sweet, sweet guitars! Basically our writing process out at the farm was to drink coffee, pick flowers and soak in bathtubs — most nights I would put on Mazzy Star while I lay in the bath for hours and they were the inspiration for this song title.
I Saw You At The Store
ζ→ Hopefully this song sounds like chips on white butcher’s paper, burnt feet on hot bitumen, wet hair drying in the summer and a small shop in a smaller town.
Baby Blue
ζ→ This track was on our EP but it was the last song we wrote for it and I guess it started the direction the album ended up heading in. The nod to western/country guitars and the bluesy feeling. The track for me looks like barren landscapes and hopefully it has the same feeling of emptiness and loneliness too.
Dreamers
ζ→ Dreamers is my favourite track on the record. While we were working on it, Billy and I drove to Bundaberg in Queensland to see a psychic my mum had gone to. We drove a couple of hours to get there; her house was in the middle of a cane field, with wind chimes blowing on her verandah. She was sitting in a rocking chair out the front waiting for us when we arrived. I recorded the session and sampled some of what she said in the track.
Born To Be Blue
ζ→ We were listening to a lot of ‘60s girl groups, and when we wrote the song we wanted to have a similar feel with the drums and the spoken word verses, like The Shangri~Las (ha).
Don’t Know Where I’m Going
ζ→ As soon as Billy wrote this we knew it sounded like the end of something and we wanted it to be the closing track. It’s New Years Eve, drinking wine, you’ve quit your job, left your house and you’re not too sure what’s next. ζ→ http://hhhhappy.com/
Review
by Jonny Nail | Sep 28, 2017 10:23:AM
••• Sydney~based duo Noire are set to release their debut album, Some Kind of Blue, on September 29th via Spunk Records. Ahead of which, Rolling Stone Australia is hosting an exclusive preview stream of the entire album.
••• Teasingly revealed over the past few months via a pair of singles — the swooning “He’s My Baby” and sparkling “Real Cool” (which vocalist Jessica Mincher unashamedly says serves as “a tribute to Air”) — Some Kind Of Blue blurs the genre-boundaries between spacey synth~laced shoegaze, straight~up indie balladry and even, somewhat unexpectedly, swerves towards something like midnight country rock AM~radio. The latter likely an addition picked up during the writing process, which saw the duo decamp to an isolated farm in rural Queensland, after Mincher attended an inspiring talk from filmmaker Miranda July in early~2016.
••• “She said some incredible things like ‘I continue to forget and remember and forget and remember and forget and remember that I’m free.’”, Mincher recalls. “The next day I quit my job, Billy and I left Sydney and we moved up to a farm in Queensland, with no phone or internet reception for three months to write an album. We set up a make shift studio in the lounge room, next to the fireplace and tried to record something every day.”
••• The big~smoke detachment has also led to a greater sense of sparsity and white~space exposure that both Mincher and guitarist Billy James use to great effect across the LP’s nine tracks. The pair balance their formative pop~ic cool with greater emotive engagement, as both vocal fragility (“Dark Was The Night”) and subtle reverb intricacies (“Dreamers) craft some of the album’s most strikingly powerful moments. At other times, Mincher is porch~based, bluntly documenting her woes to the empty sky (“Don’t Know Where I’m Going”), fantasising of ciggy~smoke filled French night~spots millions of miles away (“Born To Be Blue”) or analysing the simply life far closer to home, as with the enthralling “I Saw You At The Store”, which — somewhat surprisingly for a band once happy to shuffle on the edges of dark~pop — bounces with a Barnett~like sense of storytelling purpose.
••• It’s a sense of positivity that serves as a welcome splash of diversity to Noire’s sound. Something that even surprised the band themselves, with Mincher explaining that “the period before moving to the farm was a really dark time for us and we thought the album would turn out a lot more desperate, but in contrast it created an outlet for us to be more positive about everything.”
••• http://rollingstoneaus.com/
Also:
Written by Adam Norris on Sep 27, 2017
••• http://thebrag.com/noire-baby-blue-some-kind
Label: http://www.spunk.com.au/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NOIREband_
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearenoire/
BIOGRAPHY
••• Spunk Records is proud to announce our latest signing, Sydney~based band NOIRE ~ aka Jessica Mincher (vocals and synth) and Billy James (guitar). Following up their self~released EP Baby Blue in 2015, NOIRE have announced the release of their debut album ‘Some Kind of Blue’, due September 29 via Spunk Records.
••• Growing up in the small regional town of Gympie, QLD before moving to Sydney where they formed in 2014, NOIRE craft dark, melodic and tenderly sculptured pop songs that traverse shoegaze, reverb heavy blues and indie rock.
••• Citing inspiration from Air, Mazzy Star, David Lynch, Wim Wenders and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ‘Some Kind of Blue’ is a cinematic soundscape charting the fluidity of love and loneliness.
ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→ζ→