READY TO GO

Porcupine Tree pastiche

Ready To Go is my first experience concerning the French psychedelic outfit Black Noodle Project. Impressed by the consistent solid ratings this album has gained, considerable higher than most of their other albums, I decided to pick up The Black Noodle Project's latest, which is the very on subject of this review.

After some months of listening experiences, I can surely tell that I am not very impressed. The whole albums sounds as if it is a below the average Porcupine Tree album. It mixes both the band early and latter phases, putting PT's mellow early phase and its heavier latter phase together in one same album, but in different songs, and that, of course, comes with a price. With such similarities, Ready to Go not only suffers from the very same problems as Steven Wilson's main project, such as being way too close to Pink Floyd for their own good and having some uninteresting bitpop tunes, but also has added to it the lack of originality and generic spacy music.

Expect to find here most of the clichés from this species of psychedelic rock in one album: exotic percutions, popish songs, predictable etherial guitar riffing, Floydian tunes between Dark Side and Animals, saxophone solo (also inspired Pink Floyd), electronic beats, etc.

However, in spite of those downsides, the album is still enjoyable at times. The best parts of Ready To Go are, to no surprise, the ones with the biggest similarities with either Pink Floyd or Porcupine Tree. The first three songs (Ready To Go, Part 1; We've Let You Know; The One), Coming Up For Air, I'll Be Gone and the epic Ready To Go, Part 2 are the best this album has to offer (with Ready To Go, Part 2 being the best song the record and the Floyd-like) wile, at the other end of the spectrum, songs such as The World We Live In, From Out Of Nowhere and the closing track Farewell are either forgetable or plain boring.

Grade and Final Thoughts

With many similarities between big bands and without many qualities that make the album stand out, Black Noodle Project's Ready To Go fails to achieve more than the average grade. Through its ups and downs it cannot escape from just being somewhere in the middle and finding a unique style of their own is the only possible way I can imagine that they can have any significant improvement in their music.

3 stars.

In many ways this is one of the most diverse albums that TBNP have come up with yet. There are still the Pink Floyd and Porcupine Tree influences but the guys have also turned it up a little more so that the intensity and guitars have that little bit more edginess than usual. There may be some who think that this is going to be an ethereal and delicate album as suggested by the album artwork, and indeed there are some numbers that are in that vein, but this is again an album that brings the term 'rock' crunching back in at the right moment. Jérémie sent me this album to listen to at the same time as the collection of demos, and it is interesting to compare the two and see how the band have changed since those early days. Undoubtedly the biggest change is the in the confidence of all those involved, and this in itself allows the band to spread their wings without going too far.

The band do not try to hide their influences, but they are the starting point and not the end product. They have matured and the result is yet again an extremely solid accessible album that all progheads will enjoy. www.theblacknoodleproject.com