The energy that emanates from the Noonan Trio’s music is like a meeting of psychological delirium tremens, punk glibness, free jazz and contemporary atonal experimentalism. It’s crazy, but totally fascinating. The opening track, The Drunkard Landlady, sets the tone head-on: a raucous, in-your-face soundtrack accompanies a scabrous voice chanting I’m the Drunkard Landlady and I’m here to collect! It’s enough to make you want to move, lol. That said, you’re immediately struck by the tight dynamic between the voice and the music, between punk and free jazz, thrown at us bluntly but with surgical precision in our stunned ears. Sean Noonan is the big thinker, also the drummer and vocalist/narrator, but he’s nanometrically supported by Matthew Bourne on piano and Michael Bardon on double bass. What’s amazing is the ability of these three artists to turn on a dime and radically change the atmosphere and texture of their sound. It’s like the speech of a hallucinated schizophrenic, but in full control of the effects he wishes to provoke.
The second track, the album’s title track, Inherit A Memory, launches us into a Schoenbergian post-sprechgesang atonally coloured by the trio under Noonan’s voice, before transforming into a madcap blues over which Bourne’s piano swoops freely. It goes on like that, for around fifty minutes spread over ten tracks, in which Noonan engages in socio-political denunciations disguised in urban and contemporary poetry that takes advantage of the great stylistic versatility of this surprising trio. I’ve mentioned atonalism and punk, but the groove at large is an even more important cornerstone of the overall fabric of Inherit A Memory.
Noonan is a top-class drummer. He puts his instrument at the service of music that is fiercely creative and fully communicative. There’s nothing obtuse or hermetic about it either, despite the highly experimental references.
An album that will leave no one indifferent and certainly please the most demanding amongst us.
