Dotting the Is and crossing the beats…
[Video]
[6.50]
Josh Winters: From the jump, “Noble” aims for a very specific late-aughts/early-tens twilight taxonomy — unmistakably tracing the paranoid glamour of Kanye’s “Flashing Lights” and the numbed-out romanticism of Frank’s “Novacane.” It wants to be the soundtrack to a cinematic late-night drive down a neon-blurred highway where everything feels slightly tragic and expensive. Instead, it functions merely as an unwanted middleman. The problem with mimicking landmarks of mood and texture is that the blueprint remains too clear. Every beat drop and filtered vocal layer doesn’t pull me deeper into F3miii’s world, but ejects me from it entirely. I don’t find myself engaging with the track on its own terms; I just find myself wishing I were listening to the songs it’s borrowing from. It feels like a ghost of better memories.
[5]
Taylor Alatorre: Frank Ocean was tapping into something real when he namedropped Z-Trip, of all people, in 2011’s “Novacane.” 15 years later, though, I’m still not quite certain what that was. Beyond lending an unsettling level of reportorial detail, it’s also the first thing we learn about the girl in the song, giving her an enigmatic, shapeshifting quality — is she an ingénue outsider whose tastes are easily flattered, or an unknowable exotic whose whims are beyond anyone’s control? Either way, it’s a deeply weird and against-the-grain choice, which is not at all what F3miii is interested in doing with “Noble.” He can be forgiven for being too young for 2010 Coachella or for not knowing what “PBR&B” was — really, better for him if he doesn’t. But in channeling the era of nostalgia,ULTRA, F3miii misunderstands what made nostalgia such a potent narcotic for the addled Millennial, even as he deftly caters to the palates of his fellow backward-looking Zoomers. There’s nothing of the personal or particular in this surface-level crate-digging, no autobiographical bumps or ridges, nothing that would impede this song’s frictionless sharing by users with little else in common but a shared desire for Channel Orange II. To be frank, this is not some visionary shit.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: The boom-clap drum pattern is so commonplace in nostalgist ’80s pop productions that I’ve become genuinely pissy and reductive when I hear it. So I knew I liked what F3miii had to offer cuz as I write this, we are halfway through this song and I don’t feel a shred of frustration or irritation. In fact, he paused it to layer in the synth bass line over the cloudy synths and I miss that boom clap assemblage. To make it even more strange, there isn’t any explicit layering of any other kind of percussion apart from a brief snare roll; the drum pattern largely remains unchanged. So everything else atop it must be enticing me, but the rest of the song is small and humble; no extraneous additions to rupture or complicate the humid, plush atmosphere. But the true star is F3miii himself, his voice surprisingly light and thin at first, then revealing itself to be a bit stronger and warmer once the chorus comes, allowing him to soar musically above his peers in the post-Frank Ocean lane. This does feel in simpatico to Frank’s early wonkier RnB tracks with Midi Media, allowing F3miii a credibility in both topline and track — a credibility he’ll need going into his first album. But first indications are good!
[10]
Al Varela: One of the stranger, more out of nowhere hits of the year, but one that endeared me. There’s something strangely nostalgic about how scuffed the production is. The bloopy main melody over those plastic strings paired with the thin clap and dull thump of the beat creates a soundscape that I haven’t really heard in the mainstream in a while. When the chorus hits and F3miii bleeds his heart out in the club, there’s a strange, suffocating atmosphere that captures the stuffy, but euphoric feeling of the club. I wouldn’t call F3miii an amazing singer or anything, but in this kind of “love in the club” anthem, his passionate yells over the whooshing sound effects and bit-crushed bass really works for me. It’s also got a big sing-along chorus that’s easy to get lost in.
[8]
Dave Moore: Recalls the post-T-Pain (the-)dreamy R&B boom of the mid-aughts, but also feels a little bit like you can’t go home again, the production a little too flat for F3miii’s vocal to really break through, but not so flat that he becomes part of the atmosphere.
[6]
Alfred Soto: T-Pain nostalgia already? Well, okay. Make it less flat next time, boys?
[6]
Ian Mathers: Sweet and woozy, all the way down to “I’ll call you when I’m sober.” Honestly makes me miss being drunk in a bar when the right song hits.
[8]
Claire Davidson: The 8-bit keys that open “Noble” are almost quaint, evoking R&B crossover hits of recent vintage with enough charm that I had high hopes for the ensuing material. The atmosphere that surrounds this melody, though, is considerably more sedate in its woozily whirring keys and thudding beat—so vivid it sounds like it’s emerging from the listener’s own heart—leading the track to preemptively sound like the “slowed-and-reverb” version of itself. F3miii feels misplaced here: he sings with a dynamism that could theoretically lend the song an urgency needed to match its lyrics, but the track’s lethargic pace leaves him sounding like he’s trying to claw his way out of a drug-induced stupor, as if he ingested a substance far more potent than he initially anticipated. In this context, “I’ll call you when I’m sober” feels like the song’s most truthful line; we’ll see how he fares when the high of TikTok virality fades.
[5]