REVIEW: Nep’s ‘Noelle’ Proves We Should All Be Florida Girls
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY LENA FINE ☆
Photo By Rhianna Hajduch
NEP’S DEBUT RECORD NOELLE SETS AN ADDICTIVE SCENE OF CAGED ADOLESCENCE—and blissful hometown rage. It covers all the bases from lust to heartache, ambition to failure. The record is raw and inventive, juggling the difficult balance between soft tenderness and cathartic noise, often on the same track.
Noelle opens with “Girls on TV,” a track that immediately captures the feeling of mixing with a different crowd and perhaps mistaking that difference for their superiority. With this, Nep begins her story as an outsider. The song is fun and makes you feel like dancing, leaving you wondering if you could ever be a girl on TV, too.
“The Soundtrack” is an emotional exploration of the costs of being a muse. The weight of the feeling is amplified by the drive of the song, which begins with just vocals and guitar and develops into a full score with videogame-like licks emphasizing the agony. Nep asks the tough question: How can the person who knows you enough to romanticize your image be surprised by your flaws?
On “Biketoberfest,” Americana guitar refrains frame an episode of dissatisfied clarity. Nep illustrates she knows herself well, and for this she knows she has outgrown the landscape around her—that of motorcycles, cars, mud, Daytona. This realization seems to make itself known throughout the entire record.
Wrestling with the familiar themes of otherness and comparison, “I Close My Eyes” is a beautiful score that exposes the quiet, private moments of holding yourself up to someone else to see how you measure. “If everything I ever wanted to be was a person in a body, it would be yours,” is the core message of the song, raw and honest. “I Close My Eyes” opens up the space sonically as well, creating the sense that comparison is a feeling you can swim and get lost in.
“I Close My Eyes” bleeds into the record’s title track, “Noelle,” which begins sparse and intimate. Nep provides enough room to settle into, before bringing an intense shift starting in the first chorus. Much like the relationship described, the song twists and turns with sweeping orchestral arrangements before closing out with a completely different tune. It lets the dust settle before bringing us to the second act of the record.
With eyes on the future, “Daytona” is a declaration of change and ambition. As “Biketoberfest” laid the groundwork, “Daytona” is assured and captures the violent feeling of being so desperately done with your city, your hometown. Amidst the distorted guitar and forward vocals, “Daytona” finds the feeling of honoring the fact that you are defined by the place you want to leave.
“Black Car Song” begins as a beautiful piano ballad. It explores family, staying behind while your friends are away, and the ghost of exes past and the traces they leave on the streets. The track explodes in the second half with heavy drums and driving guitars. It captures the madness of going through your life while still looking for the car of that person you used to know, ending with a haunting distortion that sounds exactly how it feels.
“Scar” leans into the country twang of the Florida Nep is leaving behind. Painting with specific details of soda, friendship, and medication, the song continuously builds tension. With the refrain “I pick it off, I let it scar,” it opens into a distorted ballad with Nep’s vocals swirling in space like they were recorded in a church. The track ends with fuzz, diffusing into another come-down, another confession.
The opening guitars in “I Will Always Love You, Alright,” are enough to feel like a sucker punch, providing a masterful theater for the earnest and tender lyrics to come. The song is about loving people despite the way things end. It is a song born from dust settling, speaking with the clarity of understanding why something didn’t work and having love leftover, anyhow.
“All Around Beauty” is pure fun. It’s a celebration of his new girl and a forced path on the high road. Leaning more country, the track is aimed at a cowboy who’s hard to forget but who you don’t have the space to hold anymore. Like with so much of Noelle, it’s full of clarity in difficult and heartbreaking circumstances. Nep always leaves room for hope.
Rising back up in “July (It Feels So Lovely to Cry),” Nep blares a refreshing and joyful new lease on life. There’s something intoxicating and necessary in a refrain saying “I think I might love life again.” Trumpets blare and the song sounds like a celebration, which is exactly what it is.
An apt big finish, “Florida Girl” is a love letter to a hometown and a final send-off to a lame ex. With notes of Sugar Ray, the song gives the feeling of a personal army lifting you up and sending you on your way to bigger and brighter things. It’s enough to dance about, liberating in all its glory. As with Noelle as a whole, Nep makes us believe that maybe there’s a Florida Girl in all of us.
