Nicole Atkins - Neptune City 2007 WITH REVIEWS

More great music reviews & torrents at www.btbeat.com

Produced by Tore Johansson (Cardigans, Franz Ferdinand, OK Go, Saint Etienne, New Order), Nicole Atkins' Neptune City is an album that sounds like it came from anywhere but the New Jersey Americana rock tradition made famous by Bruce Springsteen. The New Jersey native's music ranges far afield: at some times vaudevillian, at others psychedelic, a little bit country, a dash from early musicals, all under a cloud of pop-noir, often all coming in the very same song. Atkins writes songs that could have come from an episode of Six Feet Under, or an updating of Grease, as directed by David Lynch.

The characters in her tunes seem to live in an idealized past. "This record is the history of my town; it's the history of my family and friend in this town," she explains. "From the time I was a kid I started collecting these sad little tragically beautiful personal stories from the people in my life, and my own as well. That sense of history really appeals to me as an artist." These tales became her blue prints, her inspiration, that would become songs like "Maybe Tonight," a Ronnettes sounding traipse about a possible chance meeting, or "The Way It Is," a dark and haunting defense, an insistence by someone hell bent on finding out for herself that something might be wrong. But it might be right, too.

The record calls to mind Roy Orbison if he were a woman; the bleak visions of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen; the darkly mysterious girl group-on-acid musings of Julee Cruise and Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti; the sorrow of Patsy Cline, the ‘60s experimentation of Love and Nuggets; all with a redeeming sense of hope amidst the emotional wreckage that is all Nicole. A sense that's perfectly captured on "Cool Enough," on which she sings, "I don't care where you're going/You're taking me with you/This place got nothing that I could want/But I think that someday, I might feel different/But still, that's someday/Still that's someday/So take me with you."

Over everything, Atkins brings a painterly quality to her music, fitting for a woman who studied illustration while at UNC Charlotte, and still has her own mural business. Her songs are aural paintings, mixing and matching colors and sounds.

"That's why I have such a hard time playing solo these days," says Nicole, who plied her trade in hundreds of bars North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey before attracting the attention of a major entertainment attorney, who helped her get signed. "When I write a song, I think about all the different layers that will go on top of it."

In the end, Neptune City comes across as a restoration project in a way, an attempt to build something new on something old. There's an acute subtlety to the art of restoration. Do it wrong and you're simply cribbing the past. Do it right and you're actually, in a profound way, carrying it forward into today. And that's what Neptune City accomplishes. It brings its past with it, carries its heart on its sleeve, and strides hopefully into a better day it can hardly imagine, but hopes will be there nonetheless.

- indie911.com

Nicole Atkins' debut full length Neptune City is big and dreamy, swirling with strings or riding a wall-of-sound rhythm section reminiscent of Phil Spector’s best girl group productions. The arrangements on this album are vibrant, lush, and propulsive. The instrumentation will swoop in and carry you along for a 40-minute ride through timeless chamber pop.

That said, the primal force that drives Neptune City is the huge and charismatic voice of Nicole Atkins. She possesses the tough charm of Chrissie Hynde and can come across just as world-weary. But then Atkins punches a higher level, and her warm, full alto comes booming forth. We sometimes forget that sound is a physical force, but not when this rock chanteuse is belting it out.

In the original mix of this album, her powerful performances were apparently harder to find in the mix. Initially scheduled for release on September 6, Neptune City was held back after a couple of early reviews noted that Atkins’ singing was lost amidst the instrumentation. In stepped new Columbia head honcho Rick Rubin, recently hailed by the New York Times as the man who could save the record industry. While that remains to be seen, the Buddha of rock probably saved this record from mediocrity. In an e-mail conversation, Nicole explained that Rubin stripped the mastering off the album, which “really opened the sound up.”

This makes sense and should have been the approach from the get-go. Neptune City is, in some ways, a throwback piece, yearning for an older and purer age, tugging its textures forward through the fog of time. In today’s mixing and mastering sessions, the emphasis is on squashing the dynamics until the music sounds tight. For dance and teen pop, this technique tends to work really well. Not so with a record such as this, however, where we need the quieter moments so that the contrasting crescendos will truly come alive. On songs like “Together We’re Both Alone” and “Cool Enough”, Atkins and her band the Sea know how to mine a low and somber mood before bursting into an orchestral chorus that ascends above time and place. This is the vantage Nicole holds in the busted fairytale torch-song that is the album’s title track, in which she sings, “I’m sitting over Neptune City / I used to love it / It used to be pretty”.

The whole of the album is held aloft in this lovely limbo. Sometimes we sink down into the sooty metropolitan sky, but only to rise above its atmosphere where we can again see the stars. If this metaphor feels hokey and a little sentimental, well, those qualities are present on Neptune City, as well. Fortunately, Atkins and company imbue the record with the kind of melancholic tinge that permeates even the most joyous of girl group songs (like “Be My Baby”!), while keeping a healthy distance from the empty sentimentality of so many Broadway show tunes (gee, thanks for the “Memory”, Andrew Lloyd Webber). Nicole Atkins deserves to find a sizeable audience. Fans of Rufus Wainwright should definitely come calling, along with those of you who’ve looked down on your hometown and dreamed of something more.

- popmatters.com

A marvelously talented fantasist with a masterly cinematic sweep

- New York Times



Artist: Nicole Atkins
Album: Neptune City
Date Of Release: 2007
Genre: AlternaPop, ChamberPop, Pop
Bitrate: VBR --alt-preset extreme