Nicholas Nicholas “Meet Me In The Park”

06 May 2014 — Henry Schiller

Nicholas Nicholas’s “Meet Me In The Park” makes me think of the perfect Brooklyn outfit. It’s an outfit that catches your eye at a Bushwick house party and never lets it go. It’s an outfit that swoops you into a decadent grotto where you’re lavished in normcore fashion and a bacchanal of milk and honey hand soaps.

A navy corduroy button-down, two sizes two big, worn like a jacket over an off-white corduroy button-down: one size too big. Corduroy number two makes a hefty paunch over the rim of comfy-looking stonewashed blue jeans that narrow frantically at the ankle. Soft denim locks lips with the tops of milky New Balance running shoes purchased secondhand at a Buffalo Exchange. These may or may not have ever been used for running. Whatever horn-rimmed glasses are, there are horn-rimmed glasses. These may or may not be prescription (they aren’t). There’s a watch worth over $400 that needs to have at least one link removed from its band. An ink smear down the rim of the left pinky: he’s an artist, or maybe a writer, or maybe he owns a pen. A tattoo of King Henry II taken from a medieval illustration peeks out over the collar flap(s). Hair like a Givenchy model, skin like a vampire, and a voice like Nigel Thornberry on ketamine. The three-dimensional realization of a sexual awakening.

This is the kind of delicate lust with which Nicholas (Nicholas?), a member of Brooklyn’s Heavenly Beat, dazzles, charms, and divides on “Meet Me In The Park.” His is a lush, almost stoned take on the oozing London warmth of new-wave groups like Japan, with signals to the “we live under a Greenpoint dock” soul-punk of contemporaries like Ava Luna. But, and this cannot be emphasized enough, with like a million more synthesizers; think New Romanticism for the Todd Terje set. “Meet Me In The Park” is transparently, wonderfully, vague in its artistic intentions. The track seems like it could wallow comfortably in the ochre haze of a Gap, but it’s also penetrating and relevant, almost like Nicholas is calling direct attention to his own lithe stylistic inconspicuousness.

I’ll never miss Brooklyn, but maybe that doesn’t mean I can’t love it a little.

People like Nicholas Nicholas are making that possible.