Shameless Tuesdays: Livre 111 | The Noise Who Runs
They may have just released the EP These Will Be Your Gods, but The Noise Who Runs isn't stopping anytime soon. Preteretrospective, their next album due on April 7, is a record that duo Ian Pickering and Felipe Goes hopes will show what they're all about. The album's first single "Beautiful Perhaps" is a gothic journey to find redemption in a world of cynicism, setting the stage for what the entirety of the record will deliver. But before Preteretrospective arrives, The Noise Who Runs has a retrospective in this week's Shameless Tuesdays!
Here's what Ian from The Noise Who Runs has to say about this week's playlist:
The playlist naturally gravitated towards 42 songs - that’s what it wanted to be, seemingly. My days, that’s long. Difficult to curate 42 songs. But dip in and out, and then there’s a kind of contextual grouping at work, subsets to the overall theme, ‘Storytelling Giants’. This is all based around the theme of genuinely first-class lyrics, that perhaps deserve a Nobel Prize for Literature, like young Mr Bob Dylan already received.
Storytelling Giants was a Talking Heads’ compilation album from 1988 and they once remarked that ‘lyrics exist so that people listen to music for longer than they ordinarily would’. Often, lyrics would make excellent reading solely on the page, but there’s a symbiotic relationship between words and music that can elevate both. What we have with this playlist is the complete opposite of ‘failure to communicate’.
There are 41 artists here, but there’s Syd Barrett Pink Floyd and Roger Waters Pink Floyd and both, for me, are very special lyricists. Nearly all of the artists here, with the exception of two or three where I just liked the one song a whole lot, have a stunning and consistent body of lyrical work, gems for the ears. I have learned from them, been inspired by them, felt braver in my own writing, been able to see more of what’s possible, had my worldview reinforced, altered or questioned and, mostly, just been blown away by how good they are.
From the very simple to the very complicated, the straighter stories, such as The River, Deeper Understanding, Cornerstone and Hyper-Ballad, to the more non-linear and abstract cut up approach of It’s the End of the World as we Know It, Come Together and Pay No Mind, I find these 42 songs to be endlessly rich in poetry, empathy, observation and compassion.
Which brings us neatly back to 42, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. According to the late Douglas Adams, you can never know the question if you already know the answer and vice versa. But here there are 42 songs with lyrics that could shepherd us in at least the right direction.
~ Ian from The Noise Who Runs
For more information on The Noise Who Runs, visit their official Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Check out their recent EP These Will By Your Gods below via their Bandcamp!
Promotional consideration provided by Shameless Promotion PR.
