#robnoyes

Usually solo acoustic guitarists like to do a little real-time warm up at the beginning of albums, easing into the first song with long strums and pronounced pauses. But on The Feudal Spirit Rob Noyes eschews all that and hits the ground running, filling opening track “Paydirt” with ringing chords and plucks that instantly spill over each other in a reverberant rush. He never lets up throughout the tune’s four minutes, generating sound as if the electricity in his house is powered solely by his hand movements.

The rest of The Feudal Spirit is more tonally and temporally varied than that description might suggest; Noyes is deft at slow crawls, picked loops, and gently swinging tunes. On “Golden Week” he even seems to approach waltz speed at times, while on “Cloistral Hush” he actually pauses as much as he plays. Yet still all 10 tracks retain the spirit of “Paydirt,” always feeling mentally and emotionally busy if not necessarily sonically packed. Noyes seems unwilling to let a moment go by without filling it with ideas and activity, and his dedication to such intense, unrelenting engagement makes The Feudal Spirit a constant thrill, like a roller coaster without an off switch.

– Marc Masters

ROB NOYES on The Feudal Spirit

The title from this record comes from a phrase that crops up in some of the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse. I don't mean to brag but I read a bunch of those books once. To me, one of the more unique qualities of his writing is that it's satire but with almost no discernible point of view, at least politcally. His subject-matter is always centered around upper-class British society and every character outside of the servant class is depicted as being irredeemably silly but nothing genuinely terrible ever happens to anyone. Wooster relies on his near-superhumanly intelligent valet Jeeves to get him out of low stakes snafus with his intricate schemes. In one of the books (can't remember) Wooster cheerfully admonishes Jeeves for not being willing to provide him with an intricate scheme by asking "Where's that feudal spirit?" It strikes me as being a deeply miserable concept given that it exists in a fictitious universe that generally doesn't recognize much worse than some sap getting embarrassed or tricked by a valet or whatever.