One of the beauties of pop music is the ability to take the sad/the scary/the unpleasant, and repackage it for us so that we sing and dance our way right out of that misery. Falling Down by Mister Nobu is my current fave embodiment of that vibe.
Mister Nobu is Nobu Adilman, a name you may know from any one of his myriad other projects, from TV’s Food Jammers to the communal singing sensation Choir! Choir! Choir!, way back to the Halifax indie cred-rockers Rick of the Skins. (Ok, maybe you haven’t heard of that last one if you weren’t in Halifax in 1999, but believe me, it was great.) Adilman has been using the Mister Nobu moniker for years, it was only this past March that the full-length album Tavie brought his solo music efforts centre stage.
And what a time to release a debut, let’s think of that again: March. 2020. March 2020. Just after shut downs first started here in Canada. The album had been a few years in the making, had been teased since the previous fall with the earnest, heartbreaker Best of Me, and suddenly everything was upside down. With this new, weird world suddenly the reality, Nobu gamely took to the stage/living room floor to present the debut of the album in the new normal that was not yet normal: an online streaming show.
I managed to dig up the recording and wanted to share it here, especially now as the pandemic drags on, its interesting to go back to the early days of us just figuring this out. The track I’m featuring on the blog, the upbeat, yet ultimately dark, Falling Down is presented at around 24:00: a glorious and surreal karaoke-style dance party, with Adilman singing along to his own track on a portable speaker and drinking champagne. For me, it was the first moment in weeks that I saw that we might find a way through.
