Review
Genre and Mood
Nôze and dOP meet on In the Back of My Ship, an electronic track by a house duo that one review heard as reggae. The feelings named here, playful and groovy, follow the reputation of both acts for tongue-in-cheek, live-played dance music, since no review describes this song beyond a single line.
Song Summary
The track is the fifth of nine on Dring, the album Nôze released on Get Physical Music in spring 2011, and it runs about five and a half minutes. The guests are dOP, a Paris trio that Resident Advisor described, like the Hamburg group Wareika on the same album, as a live ensemble. Its one written verdict is harsh: the French blog Des oreilles dans Babylone called it “le reggae faiblard”, a feeble reggae, made with Nôze’s “potes”, their pals from dOP.
Musical Breakdown
Beyond the one line about reggae, no review describes how this track unfolds, so the parts below are listening prompts, not a map.
Main Section
Listen for the reggae the critic heard: where the accents fall in the groove, and whether a house pulse keeps running underneath.
Voices
dOP’s singer writes and sings that trio’s lyrics. Listen for how many voices you hear and how they share the song with Nôze.
Outro
Listen for how a five-and-a-half-minute album track hands over to the next one on Dring, Nubian Beauty.
Concepts in Focus
dOP are the <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist here, and an unusual one: not a single singer adding a hook, but a whole group with its own sound. Textura described their 2010 debut Greatest Hits as soulful house blending funk and jazz, made by a trio with backgrounds in rock, jazz, hip-hop, reggae, classical and African music. That list makes the reggae turn of this collaboration less surprising.
Reggae is built on the off-beat, the points halfway between the main beats, where its guitar and keyboard chops usually sit. No source describes the pattern of this track, so take it as a listening exercise: count the beats and hear whether the accents land on them or between them.
Artistic Context
Nôze are Ezechiel Pailhès and Nicolas Sfintescu, and Dring was their first album since Songs on the Rocks in 2008. Fact reported that it was more instrumental and more improvised, with a stronger jazz influence, and that its players included Thibaut Frisoni on guitar, Alexandre Authelain on saxophone and clarinet and Matthias Mahler on trombone. The press release, Resident Advisor wrote, spoke of klezmer, reggae and cumbia. dOP, formed in 2006 and signed to the Circus Company label, were on Resident Advisor’s lists of top live acts in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Impact and Reception
Reviews of Dring were mixed. Groove said Nôze had become a real band but heard too much folkloric mixing; Des oreilles dans Babylone found the album a good vintage, steeped in brass, with this track among its weaker moments. Get Physical nonetheless uploaded it in 2020 for a playlist of the label’s dancefloor classics. Nôze’s remix work, heard on Dapayk & Padberg, Caro – Island, shows the club side of the same duo. Listen, and decide whether the critic was right.
