Nicholas Roy - In a Shoebox Under the Bed

With a spare parts busker from the London Underground cited as an inspiration for this record, Melbournian Nicholas Roy is someone who revels in the unique. As Max Easton writes, his debut album 'In a Shoebox, Under the Bed' has varied results.

You get the feeling from listening to Nicholas Roy that he’d have one hell of a diverse record collection. Hailing from Melbourne and playing a strange variety of alternating keys and guitar driven pop, he’s taken on a swathe of influences to produce a record of utmost uniqueness, a quality that definitely seems to be lacking in today’s spit, replicate and polish music industry. It’s an attempt that’s absolutely to be applauded, but one which doesn’t always hit the mark.

Truth be told, I just don’t know what’s going on here. This is an album that has potential to be genuinely quite good. There’s absolutely no doubt that Nicholas Roy is a talent, with a wide-ranging voice and the knack for leading effectively into a solid pop chorus, but it feels like he’s stuck between stations. There’s potential here to be a successful commercial pop outing, but it seems like he’s taken that pop muse and tried to mix in some reputability, an effect which leaves it in a place which won’t appeal to commercial radio or the conscious music listener. 

The album starts out quite well considering the flavour of that last paragraph. It's All My Fault possesses an effective arrangement incorporating keys and acoustic guitar to the backing of delicately patted bongos, playing host to Roy’s endearing vocals that occasionally hark to a Fiona Apple sourced chorus. It’s a track very worthy of single status, a good beginning to an album that degrades through Before the World Collapses, collapsing itself into a too-sweet chorus eliciting your indie-club-crossover acts like The Presets. The third track, Where To Now? poses a very good question, one which maybe wasn’t too considered as its doubled vocal tracks and sampled drum beat seem to play out as a Pro Tools demo rather than a fully realised song.

Much of the rest suffers from a similar story, with good songs stuck under club beats and cringeworthy pop choruses. The only time I didn’t sympathise with the failed experiment though, was on Walls, a track that sounds like a club remix of Josh Pyke covering Paul Simon’s Graceland with a special guest appearance by Enrique Iglesias. It introduces some flamencan hand claps and pseudo funk-guitar rhythms leaving you with a cultural clusterfuck that absolutely refuses to assimilate. It feels occasionally like three songs playing at the same time, and while I’m certainly no traditionalist, maybe a step back from the experiment would have sufficed here. It turns an album with some acoustic guitar meandering that’s at times not too distant from post-Tea Party Jeff Martin, into a sickly veiled record addressing his namesake Ricky. And Ricky Martin has NO place on an album that touches my CD player.

There are moments on this record where a merger of electronic beats and Radiohead-channelling piano strokes could be evoked to great consequence...but with the pop-sheen flavour that inevitably finds its way in, it tends to lean away from the five from Oxford and towards someone like Evanescence...without the eye shadow and violin. This is most blatant on Devilish Smile, barely lasting 30 seconds before streaking itself with sickly vocals. Where the piano driven electronics are absent, a Spanish texture finds footing - such as that on Black Dog - and it almost never works. I’ll make it no secret that I hate the Spanish and everything they stand for (what’s so good about paella? Seriously, I can’t be the only one who doesn’t wanna pay $80 for a bowl of rice and oyster shells), but regardless, it’s just far too many textures and influences in the same place to function effectively. 

This is an album which, quite often, just does not make any sense. Music isn’t a gumbo where you can throw a whole bunch of shit into a pot and come out with a delicious stew. It takes a degree of consideration, and failing that, some fucking good songs unaffected by their production. This record has neither of those, and plays out as the aural equivalent of serving hommous over pad thai. It doesn’t work, never will, and you eat with a scrunched up face nodding politely at your host. I celebrate Roy’s attempt at creating something diverse and original, but Pro Tools isn’t a magician and unfortunately it only tends to lean in his favour on the more traditionally tracked songs. 

Nicholas Roy’s In a Shoebox Under the Bed is out now.