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N*E*R*D – Seeing Sounds
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When they’re not encouraging Madonna to rant along to lewd sexual sweet shop analogies, or producing one of their 10,000 or so annual hit singles, Pharrell Williams and Neptunes sidekick Chad Hugo like nothing more than to indulge their more ‘rawk’ side as N*E*R*D. It sounds like pure self-indulgence, but it works.
This, their third album, is inspired by a Discovery channel documentary on synesthesia, the phenomenon of the senses being muddled so that sounds can be seen and sights can be tasted. So far, so Pharrell Williams: not exactly your typically brash R & B artist, you’re just as likely to find him extolling the virtues of the Starship Enterprise as you are ‘pimps and hoes’. More Dr Spock than Dr Dre.
It’s great stuff.’ 'You Know What’, with its saccharine-sweet harmonising and Radio 2 ‘Drive Time’ instrumentation could sit comfortably on a Hall & Oates greatest hits album. The glorious ‘Windows’ sounds a bit like it was recorded by a long-lost West Coast '60s garage band.
'Everyone Nose' – a p***take of Hollywood coke-heads - is almost as addictive as the white stuff itself, with its ‘All The Girls Standing In Line for the Bathroom’ hook and frantic, horn-driven rhythms. Anti-war smooch-fest ‘Love Bomb’ is schmaltzy beyond belief:, with it’s goofy, ‘love and peace’ sentiment, - it almost sounds like a Hair pastiche but somehow it just about works.
It’s a good few years since Neptunes productions infamously accounted for one-fifth of all the music played on Radio 1, and you might think such ubiquitousnessy would eventually prove their undoing. Not a bit of it. Seeing Sounds is thrilling stuff, proving this lot can turn their hands to pretty much anything.
Stewart Turner
