space sound: English Noise, by NIGHT FLIGHT (EP)
a record full of shattered romance comes from London
have you recovered
do you know what to say?
NIGHT FLIGHT are a London-based band formed by Sam Holmes, Harry Phillips, Nick Holbeck, Dan Webb, and Andy Leishman. Their first album was released in 2018, while this EP, English Noise, was published in 2024 by Roof Jump Records.
English Noise begins with a bohemian spirit, a written letter, a former lover, a request to know, to have news.
Then there's the letter that Holmes writes: he asks even though he knows the other person won't care, because perhaps "you were never really here".
Holmes asks, and wonders, how they managed to survive the whole summer, and maybe only in summer, only in that season of life, could their relationship have developed: when everyone, boys, girls, are busy going out, going here and there, looking for a place from which to listen to some "english noise". But then, of course, a year passes, and maybe it's true that you were never really here.
Monster is a desperate ballad in which we can hear from the beginning, and almost see, the pain of someone trying to forget, but whose mind does nothing but present them with the face of the one they would like, precisely, never to see again.
And so the mind becomes a monster, thoughts its tentacles, and even if thoughts grow old, the body remembers, and creates memories.
And if you remember a night at the pool, the memories make you drown, and if you used to talk at night, those same thoughts will make you sleepless ("what kind of love is this?").
The Wheel is an impatient song, it seems to be in a hurry, but it's committed "both hands on the wheel", not to swerve, because we don't know where the mind is going, we no longer have control over it.
We'll just have to "wait and see".
Young is a tale of the bourgeois dream that's shattered by doubts about things that could happen within that very dream: a construction that's not bourgeois at all, in fact.
So it's better to take refuge in memories built when young, "the Christmas eves and the trips to LA", and all the other things that, you know, you do when you're young.
Seasons closes the EP, and it's a magnificent album-closing song.
It seems winter has arrived, not only upon us, but also upon our love, Holmes sings. Seasons speaks of loves many times ended and then relived, because with time everything can be revived, in which case "we'll see".
Then the song moves to summer, where the air suggests that anything can happen. Despite this, if even in summer "you lack of any colour", then no memory can hold.
Perhaps what remains is to dream a life we might have found, within the folds of a time that no longer exists (and did it ever exist?).
and it’s starting feel like
you were never really here
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