Noise Candy Preview by Jon Wallinger

Ladies and gents, prepare yourselves for the biggest event to hit your CD player for years. Bill Nelson’s ‘Noise Candy’, 121 tracks, over 6 hours 40 minutes of magical mayhem. A collection that sees the master creator diversify from cowboys to spacemen, from country music to guitar solos that would have many a heavy metal god quaking in his boots.

I’ll try to keep this brief, which is almost impossible considering the amount of material here. But I feel that the best way is to give you a fairly simplistic CD by CD account, and maybe pick out a few of my favourites, you’ll be able to check out the rest for yourself.

We kick-off with CD1, ‘Old Man Future Blows The Blues’. The feel of this first disc is one of mood and jazz club blues that quite often go off at a tangent. You’ve heard ‘Dreamland Avenue’, the rest are all new offerings. An album that is highly chilled out and spaced out, yet with the finger always on the pulse.

A slow and dreamy start with a kind of two-in-one intro song, by track 2 the expected sampled voices have arrived, and the chilled bass groove has set the scene for the rest of this CD.

Personal favourites are the slow, gorgeous song ‘Rocket Science Ranchboy’. ‘Emerald City’, the only instrumental piece, featuring lots of voice samples (including Munchkins). ‘Buddha’s Eyes Are Everywhere’, with some sort of ethnic type chant running through. The excellent ‘Edge OF Recall’. The slow and sad sounding ‘Tomorrow’s World’. Finishing the CD with the up-tempo ‘Blowin’ The Dust Off The Book Of The Future’. Best of all, is the sexy, seedy ‘Rockarolla’, wonderful atmosphere and top notch keyboard melody for the chorus, I can't think of another Bill Nelson title that is anything like this. Orgasmic.

So to CD2, ‘Stargazing With Ranger Bill’.

Don’t know how real country music lovers will take this, they’ll either love it or hate it. I'm not a country fan, but I love this. Extremely tongue-in-cheek, with lots of cowboy samples, often quite typical country music, but then stamped with the Bill Nelson touch, creating regular bizarre results. I challenge anyone to listen to this without chuckling to themselves, wondering what on Earth Bill has been smoking! There’s four pieces from WWTWT, so you can get some idea. ‘Big Yellow Moon’, ‘Space-Ranch’, ‘All This And A Girl Like You’ and ‘Sleepy Snakes’. I am certain that this CD will be a hit with you lot----More please Bill!

There are five instrumental tracks on this CD. The first, ‘Great Plains’ is a combination of dreamy ambient music and excellent guitar work, slow but powerful. ‘More Rain’ is a gorgeous song in the same vein as ‘Big Yellow Moon’. One for the line dancers is ‘Lonesome Cowboy Radio Show’, which includes some sampled cowboy singing. If you liked ‘Visions Of Endless Hope’, then the acoustic instrumental, ‘Perdita Rose’ is for you, it even has a bonkers twist for the last twenty seconds or so. You won’t be able to get ‘Time Today’ out of your head, you’ll be singing it all day. More sampled cowboys in the excellent ‘High And Mighty’. ‘The Cowboy Club’ is a lovely slow song, which turns into something quite bizarre, you think it’s ended three times, but each time it kicks back in again.

CD3, ‘Sunflower Dairy Product’.

So what have we got here? This has generally a more poppy feel, apart from a couple of tracks with voice samples, it’s more of a normal album (sorry Bill, not that the others are abnormal).

Two tracks you’ve heard before, ‘First Boy On The Moon’, and ‘The World wakes Up’, off ‘What Now, What Next’. As for the rest? Apart from the opening track, they are all vocal offerings. Personal favourite, ‘Looking For A Lantern’. A totally chilled song, with a floating guitar. It kind of grabs you and takes you there, don’t know where there is, but that’s where you end up.

Other top runners are, ‘Down Comes The Rain’, a fairly short track, that starts sort of folkish then turns into something verging on menacing. The magic sound of ‘Magic Hill’. The brilliant poppy ‘Dumb-World’. Voice/singing samples galore in ‘Bright ‘N Breezy’, as the title suggests, very cheerful…for a bit! ‘Star Sugar Sky’ is a cool song with a really cool guitar solo.

So now we’ve got to CD4, a very aptly titled album, because with ‘King Frankenstein’, Bill has created a real monster. It’s time to kick out the wife and kids for the afternoon, turn your stereo up full and fasten the speakers to your ears. All those of you who have complained about Bill’s lack of guitar playing of late, time to eat your words, I estimate over seventy guitar breaks and solos in this CD alone! The basic rule is, if Bill stops for a breath, there’s a solo. However, this is not Be-Bop Deluxe. That era was left behind over twenty years ago, but if Be-Bop were around today, this could well be how they would sound. Listen to this CD and you can imagine Bill live with a band, (the new Be-Bop perhaps), but whatever they are called, this album must be the best reason to go for a live performance ever!

You’ve heard ‘Sunny Bungalows’, the rest is all new. We start with the strong, powerful ‘Planet Of Guitars’, see title for song’s description. I want to mention every song on this CD, but I promised to keep it short(ish). So top tunes are, ‘The Invisible Venus Of New York City’, especially Bill’s vocals. ‘Sweet Little Dreamer’, nice bluesy feel. The booming bass drum of ‘Reality Check’. The contender for "let’s release this as a single", could well go to ‘The Flower Thief’, very catchy, sounds as though we’ve gone back to about 1982. You’ll swoon over the gorgeous slow ‘Blink Of An Eye’. You’ll laugh at the bizarre instrumental ‘Horse Eats Hat’. But the last track is when you need to turn every dial higher than all the others, for we’ve reached the title track ‘King Frankenstein’, a big production sound, lots going on here, from cuckoo clocks to groaning men, choirs to disembodied voices and munchkins on helium. Big noise start, that morphs into a gentle instrumental. Fantastic.

Now wipe the blood from your ears, it’s time for your body and mind to recuperate. Bring on CD5 ‘Console’, the perfect album to chill to.

Don’t know whether it’s because I'm getting used to Bill’s instrumental albums, or that they just keep getting better and better, I think it’s the latter.

Time to lie back in your favourite armchair, close your eyes and drift off with this fine selection of ambient pieces. Nothing harsh or abrasive, just beautiful music that will lurk in your subconscious for days.

There are a lot of piano based tracks, including my personal favourite, ‘Wonderful Weather In Woodgates Lane’, this is such a simple tune, but it works absolute wonders. The dreamy ‘Ethel’s Attic’ could be from ‘Chance Encounters’. Check out the crazy sound of ‘No Bee In His Bonnet’, a slow start with lots of samples, changing tempo and style to make a strange, but wonderful, track.

‘Memo Recorder Dream Narrative No.1’, and ‘Dreamstate USA’, are two tracks containing Bill’s own voice sampled, actually they’re taken from a tape recorder, he’s even kept the clicks of stop buttons, to create an excellent effect, the latter reminds me of ‘Futurist Manifesto’.

The final CD is ‘Playtime’, this is more conventional Bill Nelson, the production values seem to be improving all the time, this is a bit of a mix of all styles, quite poppy in places, often very funky and there’s quite a lot of guitar solos dotted around this album, something I hadn’t realised I’d been missing so much.

The poppy ‘Futura’ starts things off. One you’ll not stop singing is the fabulous ‘Life Is Like This’. ‘Aloha Niagra’ is a great catchy piece, although it is a bit strange. The fantastic ‘My Elevated Sweetheart’ is a favourite of mine, menacing verse, bright chorus, blinding guitar solo, then everything collapses…and starts again, awesome. An extremely funky groove bounces along through a unique sounding ‘Hieronymous Bosch Beyond’. More amazing guitar work in the brilliant ‘Being And Nothingness Land’. The slow, beautiful ‘What We Wish For’, is exactly what I wished for.

So it’s over, the end of ‘Noise Candy’, shed a little tear…but "tears disappear in the blink of an eye", because we just put CD1 on and start all over again!

You may make your own ‘best of’ collection from this little lot, but I guarantee that when you’ve picked out your favourites, you’ll have just about the entire box set copied.

My only fear is that the cost of this may be too much for some of you. If you are a true fan of Bill, you need this collection. I would hate to think of fans out there not getting to hear this masterpiece. Let’s hope the price is affordable, or you may have to sell the wife and dog to afford it, well the wife anyway.

Hope it’s not long before you all get to marvel at this wonder.

Jon Wallinger.

P.S. Coming soon…My thoughts on Bill’s videos!

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