Songs in Search of a Soundtrack: Noah and the Whale

I am a sucker for Wes Anderson movies and indie rock bands, which means it's inevitable that I would post something about Noah and the Whale. Even the name of this London band apparently came from Anderson collaborator Noah Baumbach's movie The Squid and the Whale. And the video for their ridiculously catchy single, "5 Years Time," was certainly cut out of The Life Aquatic handbook.

I picked up their recent (and I believe debut) album, Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, and was pleased to discover a solid set of songs from beginning to end. "5 Years Time" is certainly a standout track, but I find it fascinating that Pitchfork described it thusly: "takes up familiar ukulele strums ...., violin, and a heavy beat." Only the Pitchforkians would describe that as "familiar." Have these guys ever listened to a Top 40 radio station?

But I digress. The rest of the album is not as happy/shiny as the single, but the songs are nearly all catchy and well-performed. As I mention in the post title, these songs--most of which are about love, death, love and death, or the death of love--could easily fall into the soundtrack of a quirky indie romantic comedy (or, hey, even a Wes Anderson movie). That's not meant to be a negative critique, because I would probably enjoy or even buy such a soundtrack. It's just that a lot of these songs are begging for a montage, and I can't think of an album that's ever struck me like that before.

Enjoy the video (I challenge you not to enjoy it, at least a little bit), and know that the song comes from a very decent album. The more I listen to it, the more it's growing on me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRX5kH6IrkY

(This video became un-imbeddable, so you'll just have to cut and paste the link)