The Noise Who Runs are a Franco-English duo which was put together by Ian Pickering from the Sneaker Pimps who relocated from Hartlepool to Lille in France and started working with French guitarist Felipe Goes in 2019. Following on from the tracks ‘One Scratch Each’ and ‘Tune Out, Turn Off, Drop In’ (both videos are below) they now bring us ‘Mars Attached’.
The track is a brooding electronic swirl that ably captures the feeling of floating in space. Dark matter courses through the veins of ‘Mars Attached’ as if translating the inky blackness of space through the patches of a synthesiser with additional sounds which create the background effect of the spaceship’s computer. The lyrical repetition of “Forget me not, forgive me not” could be the lament of a proxy Major Tom, far from home and reflecting on the life he left light-years behind.
Pickering says the thinking behind the track was like a musical palindrome: “I had to check the spelling on palindrome because I was gonna think up one of those ‘preteretrospective’ type word combinations – I thought it was double ‘ll’ and the entry that came up was about the longest palindrome being a Finnish word which translates as ‘soapstone vendor’ (NB: Joyzine makes a note to set up a prog band called Soapstone Vendor).
I was already obsessing on making the lyrics a perfect palindromic structure and it wasn’t happening in a precise enough way, or I was being too strict on the principle, so the first verse kind of came out about the insecurity of writing in general and specifically trying to have a perfect structure without losing any quality in the poetry and then the second verse comes in like the modern day Person of Porlock from Kubla Kahn, breaks the introspection and sounds the attack about the catastrophic lack of thinking going on, the demonising of whole swathes of society and sets that against the pipe-dreams about colonising the stars, starting with Mars, a venture that I’m afraid we’re not decent enough people to undertake because it’s all exploitation over exploration and up for sale now.”
The Noise Who Runs are:
Felipe Goes – guitars, pianos, keyboards
Ian Pickering – vocals, keyboards, pianos, beats
The Noise Who Runs socials: Website | Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Soundcloud | YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music
LYRICS
Forgive me not, forget me not
The best dreams are of your hearts not beating…
Words don’t fail me to signposts like sequenced, ordinal numbers
Don’t play me, double-bluffed, stitched up, forwards, backwards
Twice crazy, lining up the odds against a soapstone vendor
Words fail me, narrowing us down until it’s just not mentioned
Forgive me not, forget me not
The best dreams are of your hearts not beating…
Forget me not, forgive me not
The best dreams are of your heart not beating
Knocking on the door comes dumb, lame, stupid
Hanging rope ready for the judged and juried
Fast repentance barely past the surface
Absolution only wipes their faces
The best dreams are of your hearts not beating…
Forgive me not, forget me not
Review by Paul F Cook
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