Album Review; Noonday Dream

Holly Blackmore

‘I am the gentle days, after all that noise’

Ben Howard returns with his third full-length release, a joltingly transcendent exploration of love and the bane of human existence. On the surface, it’s somewhat different to his earlier albums, perhaps more delicate – but no less pervasive. Listen again, and his words begin to seep into your mind like the swell of a foreign tide.

Most probably the tide of Cornwall, England, where parts of the album were written. Ben’s desert island folk seems to encompass the very sounds of the landscape itself, moving water, an overhead canopy of leaves. Married to the sunshine in my mind, I was floating away. The tracks are also influenced by time spent in southwest France, a flat expanse of marsh and canals, bay-side beaches and local wine. Ben murmurs chastely about the rugged beauty of nomadic departures, the lure of the over-looked road. Extended, existential riffs are used to juxtapose this ascetic ideal with our modern, materialistic reality.

‘Noonday Dream’ is certainly not exempt from any heart-break. Once again, Ben steers his soft, yet forcefully climatic sounds towards the realm of romantic anguish. It’s how we live, in lavender and no affection, as he candidly conveys in ‘There’s Your Man’. There seems to be something lost in the very act of love itself, a sacrifice of one’s self to the taunting of recollection and remorse. I may be floating through memories. Floating. I’m certainly floating through this release, stranded in time, space and retrospection.

The most ethereal element of the album, as a whole, is Ben’s artful construction of an atmosphere. We may as well be wandering along the Cornwall coast, or sipping sauvignon blanc in rural France. The mood is quite different from earlier work, but no less worthy of celebration.

‘Noonday Dream’ is undoubtedly the gentle, after all that noise.