Album Review: MEMORIA, in blue by Noah Guy
The Philly singer’s debut is a warm, unpolished grief record made almost entirely with his roommate. It sounds exactly as close as that implies.
Noah Guy spent the pandemic in his parents’ house outside Philadelphia with a $15 Walmart microphone and GarageBand. That period forced him into songwriting as a daily practice, and the habit stuck when he relocated to Los Angeles, where he spent his first year couch-surfing and recording Who’s Taken Time?!, a pair of five-track EPs that introduced his voice to a small but growing audience. Most of MEMORIA, in blue was made with Devin Concannon, who goes by Choob, Guy’s roommate and the producer on nine of the ten songs here. The two met when Concannon sent a beat pack online; they ended up sharing a lease and a daily creative schedule, and the closeness prints itself across the album.
Concannon’s production favors programmed drums cushioned by live instrumentation, keys surfacing and receding, and guitars arriving where a loop might have sufficed, resulting in warmth without tipping into softness. Guy’s voice, stacked and doubled over itself throughout, carries the Philly record-shop education he grew up on, Gamble & Huff, Motown, the Soulquarians circle of D’Angelo and the Roots. He doesn’t tune his vocals. The grain is the instrument, full-throated and a little scuffed at the edges, and on MEMORIA, in blue, his first full-length, he puts more trust in that roughness than most debut singers would risk.
Guy is at his most furious with “Green Vows,” and his voice pushes hard enough to match. He is singing about someone who dampened his desire, burned up every promise they’d planted between them, and showed up with violence as a substitute for tenderness. “You brought me to the fire/You dampened my desire/One touch broke the way I love,” he sings, and each line climbs higher than the last, his grain thickening as he heats up. The greenbacks are burning too, money, vows, the whole shared life tossed into a blaze that started out personal and spread. “Again” tilts into waltz time, a sway that softens the sting of what Guy is actually saying. Don’t come back. He refuses to teach a lover how to earn what they squandered. “The room you brought me to bathe me in,” he spells out midway through the verse, “the same room that you brought him to, made your bed now.” The betrayal is domestic and exact, same room, different body, and the waltz-time swing gives it a strange grace, a measured turn away from someone who stopped deserving the seat.
The sway carries over into “That’s My...” but the fury drops away, replaced by something closer to confusion. Guy wants to be held up “like I’ve been holy,” wants to feel big, but the person he’s asking keeps covering his dreams in smoke and screams. The bridge gets to the album’s emotional center:
“Lie me down, paint the sounds of our coldest truth
My baby blue, never proud of her coldest truth.”
The song isn’t about losing love so much as losing faith that love was ever what the other person came for. Billy Lemos produces “My Loss” with an open, patient hand, the beat breathing where Concannon’s tend to press, and the track benefits from the difference. Amaria, who has been in Guy’s orbit since the cabin sessions at Lake Arrowhead, takes the third verse, and she shines. “I can’t wait for you, baby/I know things fall apart,” she offers, and what could read as a platitude on paper carries real fatigue in her delivery. Her verse flips Guy’s grief to the other side. She is the person who has decided to stop waiting, and the weight of that decision comes through in how deliberately she phrases each line.
Guy’s gentler moods get their own corners. On “Bella’s Sound” he turns over someone who’s still on his mind after time apart, wondering if they’re looking fine or even better. The detail that separates this from any other ex-on-the-brain song is the mama praying on a granddaughter while Guy covers his skin in leather, two generational pulls in one image, tenderness and rebellion occupying the same household. “Bluesy Mae” has guitars doing most of the talking, though it doesn’t actually play as blues. Lucy is high, Lucy is down, Lucy is running through the town all night, and Guy is caught somewhere between adoration and admission that the laugh don’t cut anymore. “God forbid that you smile,” he breathes near the end, half-wishing she would and half-afraid of what it’d cost. He doesn’t deliver a moral or earn an epiphany. He just describes the shape of someone who changed how he felt about feeling.
On “Cézanne,” Guy traces the steps of a vanished relationship and compares the absence to a painting whose strokes don’t touch, close marks that never quite meet. The other person took a plane to Denver; he left the painting behind, hoping they’d pick it up and grieve the same. They won’t, and he knows it. “But your heart don’t grieve the same, baby,” he pleads, repeating the line until it stops being a complaint and becomes a fact he’s learning to carry. “Higher” shifts the mood entirely. The percussion chops and stutters in a way that recalls Amerie’s “1 Thing” before the groove opens into an upbeat, danceable rush, and Guy’s prayer for forgiveness (“We pray for forgiveness/and take off all our armor”) rides a beat that actually wants to move. The album’s heaviest word, “grieving,” shows up one last time, but the drums are pushing forward, reaching for a star the fear of the light can’t quite block. Guy lets himself want something larger than the hurt, and the groove gives him the room.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Green Vows,” “Again,” “My Loss”