Some Bettie Page bangs, two large smoky eyes, a fragile silhouette all dressed in black perched on high heels with a modern twist, Nicole Simone seems a character coming straight from a 30’s film noir. Her very sensual voice whispers so close to your ears you can almost touch her aching, and her laments over doomed relationships became as real as an awakened dream. When she sings she opens wide deserted spaces, deserted by love and haunted by distress and longing for something that does not exist anymore, just like the time she seems to have escaped from.
The piano, the bass, the guitar, the gentle drums, and the smooth trumpet create a dark and mysterious cabaret atmosphere that brings nostalgia. As many have already said, there is a cinematic dimension to many of her songs, but certainly a mix of many influences which makes it more difficult to pigeonhole her on her self-titled 6 song debut EP released in. This has taken years to perfect. Nicole has been working on her sound for the past five years after finding singing the American songbook too restrictive. A stint on the soundtrack of “Marie Antoinette” for Sofia Coppola finds her sound in embryo and lead to a friendship with Jason Schwartzman who plays drums with her band.
And more pleasurable to watch her on stage. During a lateish performance last night at the Bootleg, it was easy to rely on your imagination for a cinematic drive through the movies as you watch Nicole on stage.
“The Wedding Song” is one of my favorite songs, how can you resist a song with a Tom Waits atmosphere about desperate dreams of potentials that life inevitably destroys? It’s like a scene from “Mulholland Drive” (or from her sun drenched and deadly video for “Melt” referencing Wim WInders)
Nicole’s songs can be provocative and distill an ardent desire (‘I’ll play until my fingers bleed’) an erotic mood, dangerous at times andyou can certainly understand the David Lynch citation as one of her influences. Lyrics like ‘You’re darker than the devil/You know that’s what I like/You’ve got me coming back for more every night,’ or ‘I got to save the world from loving you,’ evoke in a few lines the seduction of a destructive relationship. ‘Teach me’ is a sensual song with an undertone of submissiveness which can be almost as disturbing and ambiguous as a Lynch movie precisely. It is funny that in this same song, the ‘each’ in the lines ‘Each morning/Each noon/And each night’ almost sounds like the German ‘ich,’ reinforcing the cabaret feeling.
Thursday night, her voice was as clear and delicate as on the recording, almost whispering at times, powerful at other times, very young as coming from a child woman.
She wants to haunt you, haunt you… she sings in the song of the same name, and frankly, the public could not agree more. This is not loud music, this requires silence from the public, and people were so quiet that when two photographers exchanged a few words, it was suddenly noticeable. She sang songs that are not on her debut EP, like ‘Fall From Grace,’ which will equally satisfy her new fans.
Her dark and erotic performance is certainly an homage to the film noir genre, but the execution is not forced at all and the sophisticatedly seductive ambiance she created makes you want to hear more about dangerous love and doomed relationships.