Nicole Atkins
Neptune City

Why dedicate an album to a small town in New Jersey with just over 5,000 souls? Because Jack Nicholson lives there? Or Danny De Vito? Because Bruce Springsteen was born there?
She didn’t do it for these reasons. She was born and raised in that small town, it shaped her, and she is so proud of it that she dedicated her first album to it.

This isn’t yet another hyper-produced and “synthetic” pop-girl made in the USA, nor another wayward fake rock-girl, but a genuine singer-songwriter, the kind we haven't heard in a long time. Nicole Atkins defines herself as a pop-noir songwriter, and listening to the album, this seems a fair – albeit simplistic – definition.

The album tells of a slice of the world, starting from Neptune City, from Atkins's own life, from these little stories that could be the stories of many. All of it delivered in a sometimes ironic, often melancholic, and always moving key. The musical atmosphere is varied, but held together by a very personal style. There's a certain country, '60s psychedelia, musical atmospheres, traces of soul, but Nicole Atkins’s personality emerges and ties everything together perfectly.
Direct, very catchy, and engaging is the track that opens the album: Maybe Tonight, where memories of the Ronettes come to mind, one of the musically “easier” moments of the album, but not of lesser quality for it. There’s an odd sensation of joy and melancholy that the song manages to evoke, in its questioning whether to “seize the moment.” The listening continues pleasantly with Together We're Both Alone, whose pompous arrangement leads us to one of the most beautiful and moving songs of the album, which has occasionally been played on the radio (fortunately, though often late at night) and on music television channels, namely The Way it Is: musically linked to a certain American tradition (as mentioned earlier, between musicals and '60s), here Nicole Atkins's voice is delivered with a truly thrilling strength and vigor; the timbre is genuinely beautiful, far from those “squeaks” or unnecessary and forced “trills” we often have to listen to. A story, a love story, of torment and inner searching, but all very “noir.”

Cool Enough, whose lyrics, inspired by real stories, address the perception and judgment of people that change after certain events: inspired by a professor who ended up in jail after a relationship with his student, it maintains a musically high level, rich in arrangements, leading from a dark and almost hypnotic intro to a full, engaging finale. After the beautiful and melancholic ballad War Torn and Love Surreal (a song perhaps we wouldn't miss much), we reach the beautiful Neptune City, a moving dark tribute to her small town, and to all those microcosms that so influence each of our lives.
The lightening comes with the children's chorus of Brooklyn's On Fire, while Kill the Headlights is almost a bridge, between today and the sixties sounds of the album's finale, with that Party's Over with a dreamy yet never weak voice.

In this album, rich in suggestions, we find many references (one could add the Mamas and Papas, Roy Orbison, Badalamenti, etc.), but what's certain is the originality, as is the vocal class, the compositional skill, and the charm of this new queen, not of pop (never!), but of Pop-Noir.