City Belt: NICOLE ATKINS: 'NOTHING SHORT OF BOOMING SWEETNESS'

The indie ingenue connects David Lynch with Monmouth County as she makes the move to Columbia Records.
By Shane Smith

“This is Shane,” said Nicole Atkins at the merch table back in April, introducing me to The Sea's drummer, Dan Mintzer. “He comes to all our shows.” It was a slight exaggeration, but I was grateful for the acknowledgement.

I've become a bit of an obsessive fan since the first time I saw Nicole Atkins & the Sea at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge last November. I went along with a friend of mine to see matt pond PA and we both fell in love with Nicole and her band, who were among the opening acts. In the MySpace message I sent to Nicole the following day, I declared that “everybody in the room wanted to marry [her] after the set.”

A couple months later, I went with the same pal to see them again at that pillar of the Lower East Side, Rothko, and introduced myself. I found Nicole just as charming and slightly shy in person as she is on stage. Although the smallish venue wasn't packed that rainy night, Nicole and the Sea outdid themselves. That performance stands out for me as the best I've seen of them, and one of the best shows I've seen, period.

Since those two shows, I've seen NA&S perform a few more times, and played Nicole's pre-Sea, pre-major-label demo record, Party's Over, til it begged for mercy. Happily, NA&S has just released Bleeding Diamonds, a six-song EP with new versions of some of the songs from Party’s Over, plus the soaring title track. Nicole says that the new record, which critic-at-large and former Geeks frontman Roy Trakin calls “a handy introduction” to the upcoming full-length due on Columbia, is all about nostalgia. Nicole compares the music on Bleeding Diamonds to her hometown of Neptune, where “there are parts of town you would have no idea what era of time you’re in.”

That characterization fits the band as well, as no one seems to be able to find a neat category to put NA&S into. Their sound seems to invite imaginative, unwieldy metaphors, such as “Echo and the Bunnymen meets Radiohead, only in the ‘60s,” or “a circus band stopping for a quiet jam at a Spanish church,” from Crackers United and Marie Helene at The Deli, respectively. The band’s been called folk, anti-folk, folk-pop, jangle-pop, and more. Genres aside, NA&S deliver graceful, potent songs with pregnant lyrics and plenty of pop sheen, and Nicole’s vocals are somehow demure, desperate, and earth-shaking at the same time.

Given the sundry descriptions of the band, it’s not surprising that Nicole’s musical tastes are all over the map. I asked Nicole, who was named one of Rolling Stone’s “10 Artists to Watch in 2006,” whom she would add to that list. Her answers included The Avett Brothers (“classic country songs set on fire”), Parlor Mob (“the best real rock ‘n’ roll band I think anyone’s seen in a long time”), and Gil Mantera's Party Dream (“gold lamé thongs, broken beer bottles and a Hulk Hogan mustache … it's ridiculous but I think they might have invented awesome”).

Like the more prominent scene ingenue of the moment, Jenny “1980s sitcom/movie goddess” Lewis, Nicole Atkins is often compared to Loretta Lynn. But in performance, where Jenny takes it high-saturation, technicolor Vegas, Nicole goes for more subdued hues, like a piano bar just off the boardwalk in Atlantic City (or better yet, Asbury). The production on Bleeding Diamonds is lush, sparkling, and absolutely gorgeous. Just like on the demo tracks, Nicole's voice is showcased, but now the edges are rounder and we can really hear the subtleties of the instrumentation, with some lovely strings thrown in, too.

“Neptune City” benefits most from this treatment, becoming fully the torch song of a lounge act with indie noir styling. You can see the indie kids in the bleachers at Northsix, drinking their Pabst Blue Ribbon out of cocktail glasses, Nicole crooning, stretched out over a baby grand, and Dan “Cashmere” Chen living up to his name on the ivories. The new EP is a thrill to hear.

But there's a part of me that misses the ever-so-slightly rough edges of Party's Over and the demo of “Bleeding Diamonds” that you could still hear on NA&S's MySpace page til not too long ago. As MySpace user Under Laura’s Covers commented, “it still sounds wonderful, but something doesn't seem quite right.”

Can it be that Nicole’s record about nostalgia makes me nostalgic for the “early days” of a band I’ve known for less than a year? Is this just Something That Happens when a favorite indie band signs with a major label?

In a way, listening to any NA&S recording is disappointing, because they are such a memorable live act. I remember a similar feeling of ambivalence, which I quickly got over, when I brought Party’s Over home from one of those first live shows I went to. Most likely Under Laura’s Covers and I are just uncomfortable with the slightly different sound of the songs, the more professional production values that come with “get[ting] to record in a real studio instead of my parents’ den,” which, as Nicole points out, “is very nice.”

Lest we fear that their Columbia deal will make NA&S somehow inaccessible or too-conventional, we need only witness the Bleeding Diamonds release show, which was put up at a bowling alley in Asbury Park. Although she now lives in Brooklyn, Nicole is a Jersey Girl through and through, and seems to make a real effort to book shows in the Garden State as much as she can. “When I'm away from New Jersey for even a week,” Nicole confessed, “Monmouth County can seem like the promised land ... and my mom makes really great sauce every week.”

Nicole has often been quoted on her fascination with David Lynch, and she says that “there is a thing about Monmouth County that is extremely Twin Peaks.” The association is apt, what with the voluptuous arrangements and shiny pop on Bleeding Diamonds that draw a translucent veil over lyrical themes that are by turns dark (suicide, a war bride, a widower), and dark and kooky (amusement park demolition). Think of the Cogen plant along the Turnpike at night, but with lighting by Donald Holder of Broadway’s “The Lion King”. Oops, there goes another of those clumsy metaphors.

Ultimately, it’s Nicole’s songwriting chops that make the band’s recordings such a pleasure to listen to. Nicole, who won the 2005 ASCAP Foundation Sammy Cahn Award for “Neptune City,” has said that her background as an illustrator and muralist helps her create the mood of her songs. When she brings a new song idea to the band, she told me that she often uses imagery to explain what she’s going for: “Make it sound like a jack-in-the-box where the plastic is melting off and turning into snow. Or something like that.”

On the Michael Kelly Guitars website, Nicole can be found cooing over her new Trio Rose guitar in one of perhaps many product endorsements to come: “This guitar is beautiful!!!” The website copy describes the Trio Rose model by saying that “the tone produced is … nothing short of booming sweetness.” Now, there’s a way to describe Nicole and the Sea that’s not so ungainly.

Nicole Atkins plays at Maxwell's this Friday, Oct. 20, at 10 pm. The show is $8 and Hopewell opens.

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