Artist: Nick & June
Title: Flavor & Sin
Genre: Folk Pop
Release Date: 20th September 2013
Label: Bullet Records
Album Review by
Singer-songwriters NICK AND JUNE have been active since 2011, ‘Flavor and Sin’ being the new release from this German duo singing sweet pastoral pop with English lyrics. Reminiscent of early NOAH AND THE WHALE, the aim is for a timeless simplicity to the music, and a lazy shrug at trends and genres. It’s dreamy at times, quietly and patiently going about its business, but this isn’t always a good thing.
On first track, ‘Hold On’, there’s a simple melody, and a hummable tunefulness to carry it, but it becomes obvious alarmingly quickly what a terrible singer Nick Wolf is. Weedy and reedy, it sounds like a comedy SIGUR ROS at times, helped only by the chirpy harmonies of June Kalass. ‘Annie Hall’ fares slightly better, breathy vocals and perky asides leading to a surprisingly meaty mid-section. By the end, it’s a complex and perfectly realised pop song. Sparsely arranged ‘Coming Home’ is delicate and weepy at the start, but as it builds and develops it’s again hindered by lazy vocals, a singing style that by now you either love or hate. It feels something of an affectation, the obsession with tweeness harking back to the NME’s C86 compilation where bands like THE PASTELS and TALULAH GOSH paraded their foppishness with great aplomb. It’s just irritating here.
On single ‘Little Things’ there’s some nice male/female vocal interplay, a gorgeous bouncy piano refrain over softly strummed guitars, and it works surprisingly well despite the cheesiness running sloppily through its happy veins. More like this would be a bonus, as ‘Fall for Me’ descends almost into dirge and is a poor follow-up. There are shades of light and dark running through ‘Solve The Mystery’ and ‘Homesick Blues’, but not enough substance to really engage with. It’s like being trapped in a watercolour painting where hazy white clouds skim the sky and some old farmer in the distance never finishes ploughing his field. It’s pretty, sure, but it’s also quite boring. ‘Here I Am’ drifts by on a slow tide of either loveliness or tedium, depending where your mood is by now, and it’s left to final track ‘The Dancer’ to shake things up a bit. An almost U2-sounding guitar climax and perfectly balanced harmonies make this easily the highpoint of the album, and definitely a direction they should take more often. What a pity it’s only there for the final two minutes of the album.
This is all fine if you like gentle, unchallenging background pop, it’s twee, cheesy, cute and endearing. But cute soon becomes cloying, and the lack of standout tracks and melodies soon renders ‘Flavor and Sin’ as ineffectual as a bad poetry book leaning hopefully against a stack of good, solid classic fiction.
Tracklist
01. Hold On
02. Annie Hall
03. Rain In June
04. Coming Home
05. Little Things
06. Fall For Me
07. Caroline
08. Solve My Mystery
09. Homesick Blues
10. Here I Am
11. The Dancer
Line-up
Nick Wolf
June Kalass
Website
http://nickandjune.com / https://www.facebook.com/nickandjune
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 5
Sound: 5
Total: 5 / 10
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