|
REVIEWS
ALL
MUSIC
Review by Thom Jurek
Even writing about this album feels like giving too much away. Nurse with
Wound's Huffin' Rag Blues is something you would never have expected from
them -- or would you? Steven Stapleton has been his own recording project
since 1978, and as such, he and his collaborators have taken on virtually
every Western genre -- and then some. They've engaged in so many different
kinds of music murder that they've resurrected its sleeping spirit in
their own image. Stapleton teams with composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist
Andrew Liles as his co-creator in musical terrorism as they take on the
exotica and lounge genres. Longtime friends of NWW Colin Potter and Matt
Waldron are on board as well. Canadian singer/songwriter Lynn Jackson
exchanges her folk-rock priestess crown for the little black sequined
dress of a nighttime barroom chanteuse and channels everyone from Lynn
Marino of the Frank Cunimondo Trio to Peggy Lee. Likewise, composer and
performer Freida Abtan does her amazing, slightly campy European (though
she too is Canadian, but then, Montreal is its own country) impression
of the singers in Italian film soundtracks; she also contributes percussion
and her better-known brand of electro-acoustics as well. Waldron does
his very best (a literal double take at the credits) Nick Cave on "Black
Teeth." Diana Rogerson also sings on a pair of cuts.
Huffin' Rag Blues is the sonic terrain where Les Baxter and Esquivel meet
the dark edges of a future -- which has already happened and no one noticed
-- that reflects, in the eternal echoes and colors of space, their own
sonically imagistic futurism back at them. They are recognizable, but
something has happened to them too. Stapleton and Liles are faithful to
a degree in how they "hear" exotica and lounge, but there is
that other, specifically NWW aesthetic at work here: how far can they
bend it, break it, morph and pervert it, until it becomes something wholly
other, something categorically NWW? This is the secret to every NWW recording
that borrows from other sources of inspiration. This isn't like any reading
of this music you've ever heard before; it is deliciously dark, dripping
with black humor as well as suspense, in both compositional and architectural
sophistication. One can imagine Neal Hefti encountering this is an unlit
room (not a pretty sight, though), or Martin Denny suddenly taking a turn
through John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Luc Ferrari, then nervously and
excitedly bringing his Polynesian sound experiments into the studio. Blues,
jazz, crime films, bachelor pad, and TV serial music are treated and discarded,
then chopped and recycled in a mix that contains a ton of space, but is
also bursting with dynamic tension, hilarious asides, sexually suggestive
poetry, and a certain rock & roll abandon. While one can recommend
"The Funktion of the Hairy Egg," "The Thrill of Romance...?,"
"Groove Grease," and "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'" as
excellent examples that relate to the description above, alas, they only
tell a small part of this quixotica story. This is feeling music for thinking
people, or drinking music for teetotallers. It can raise one's hackles,
or perhaps push one toward a laughter so uncontrollable that it may be
dangerous to one's health. Huffin' Rag Blues is one of only two imaginary
soundtracks in 2008 (the other is Barry Adamson's Back to the Cat) that
are as important as underground hip-hop, Current 93, or the new jazz-funk.
It's brilliant, maddening, hilarious, and sinister enough to warrant a
place in any collection with a bit of quirk and squeal.
SOUNSECT
As a longtime fan of Nurse With Wound, I was both eager and afraid to
hear the latest effort by Steven Stapleton and crew, Huffin’ Rag
Blues. Up until it’s release it was touted as a very lounge-inspired
release with vocals that harkened back to Peggy Lee. Not really knowing
what to expect I put the disc in the player and was pleasantly surprised
by the outcome.
The short opening track, “Willy the Weeper,” begins with a
whimsical tune that fades into a terrifying growl, letting you know that
this is still clearly a NWW release. Between the droning, free-form jazz
of “Thrill of Romance..?”, the lounge organ of “Groove
Grease (Hot Catz)”, and the piano of “Wash the Dust From My
Heart” the setting of this album is created. A dingy, smoky subterranean
club, pulled out of David Lynch film.
Where the album strays from the lounge concept is on the tracks “The
Funktion of the Hairy Egg” and “Juice Head Crazy Lady”.
The nearly 14 minute long “Hairy Egg” is mostly a traditional
Nurse With Wound track for the majority of it’s length. Vocals kick
in around the 9 minute mark and the underlying noises morph into the tribal
drumming and animal sounds of a rainforest cacophony.
One of the more interesting choices on Huffin’ Rag Blues is definitely
“Black Teeth”. The vocals by Matt Waldron make this track
sound like a Tom Waits inspired Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds outtake…
not something you would expect to be said about a Nurse With Wound song,
especially one that apes Sheena Easton lyrics.
The highlight of the album is the track “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’”,
which has an equally great remix found on The Bacteria Magnet mini LP.
Utilizing car horns, car radios and other auto related samples, it seems
easily to be the track on Huffin’ Rag Blues that the most fun was
had making.
Huffin’ Rag Blues could be difficult for a lot of Nurse With Wound
fans to get into as it is somewhat of a departure and is, on the surface,
one of Stapleton’s more accessible outings. After 30 years in the
making music business, it is clear to me that Steven Stapleton is still
being as experimental and innovative as he was when he first began Nurse
With Wound.
Reviewed by: Tom Gilbert
PREFIX
MAGAZINE
By Brandon Bussolini
Under the Nurse With Wound name, Stephen Stapleton has spent the better
part of the past three decades being elusive. In a sense, he’s been
hiding in plain sight the whole time. He lives in rural seclusion and
avoids publicity, but he’s an inveterate collaborator (most notably
with Current 93 and Stereolab) and regularly releases albums -- it’s
just that these albums create distinct, hermeneutic sound-worlds that
have more to do with his esoteric cultural obsessions -- which run the
gamut from dada to David Lynch, from Austin Osman Spare to Snoop Dogg
-- than traditional notions of music.
This disregard for musicality means that a benchmark album like 1982's
Homotopy to Marie, which was Stapleton’s first solo effort as Nurse
With Wound (the debut Nurse With Wound album, 1979's Chance Meeting on
a Dissecting Table, was the work of a full band), doubles as either cinema
or a really potent Halloween sound-effects tape. Huffin’ Rag Blues
incorporates more familiar musical trappings -- including instruments
(played live, even), rhythm, and singing -- than almost any other Nurse
With Wound release to date. Even with this surface discontinuity, however,
the album’s main preoccupation is, as ever, creating environments
for lucid dreaming rather than creating music qua music.
The album opens with “Willy the Weeper,” short monologue that
ranks as the most uncomplicatedly corny thing in the Nurse With Wound
discography. It’s not worth lingering over here except to point
out that it suggests a possible analogy with Twin Peaks: The same way
that series’ first season established a pitch-perfect marriage of
the familiar (soap opera dynamics) and the uncanny (the woods, for one),
only to drift through a patience-testing second season before concluding
with the fascinating disaster of Fire Walk with Me, Nurse With Wound has
made a left turn here toward art that’s more facile and still hard
to dismiss. A track like “Black Teeth,” for example, with
its growlin’, free-associatin’ vocals courtesy of irr. app.
(ext.)’s Matt Waldron, can feel like something genuinely new for
the group (while reminiscent of certain Sun City Girls tracks) and a little
like pandering to an audience I’m not sure exists.
Which might be the point, and one of the only places Stapleton can go
to continue confounding expectations. There’s nothing here that
suggests diminished possibilities -- Stapleton’s not against the
wall, and the album’s as spacious as any other Nurse With Wound
release. Although Stapleton’s studio manipulations are more understated
here, they give the more loungey numbers (like the mid-album highlights
“Thrill of Romance…?” and “Livin’ with the
Night”) a sense of subtle but pervasive off-centeredness as percussion
pans between speakers.
Even though Huffin’ Rag Blues is less of an immersive experience
than previous Nurse With Wound albums, it’s hard to see it as anything
other than a definitive statement. It’s simply the latest in a long,
discontinuous history.
BRAINWASHED
Written by Jonathan Dean
Sunday, 29 June 2008
cover image The first proper Nurse With Wound full-length to come along
in quite a while is an album-length exploration of the exotica, kitschy
swing and cutout-bin jazz genres that have long been an audio fetish for
Steven Stapleton. On paper, the idea sounds great. In practice, Huffin'
Rag Blues is sometimes interesting, sometimes laborious, and for a longtime
Nurse With Wound fan such as me, largely a disappointment.
The closest parallel to the music on Huffin' Rag among Stapleton's past
work is 1985's The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion, in which Stapleton
along with a large ensemble of NWW satellites—David Tibet, Edward
Ka-Spel, Jim Thirlwell, William Bennett, Diana Rogerson, among others—took
great joy in deconstructing, reconstructing, destroying, mocking, celebrating
and generally pulverizing a dizzying collage of easy listening favorites,
all pervaded with an infectiously irreverant, anarchic attitude. Something
similar is going on with Huffin' Rag, a large ensemble of collaborators—including
Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron, R.K. Faulhaber, Colin Potter, Diana Rogerson
(again), Peat Bog, and Aranos—and an agenda that includes off-kilter
versions of lowbrow jazz, but something is missing. Actually, two somethings
are missing: the experimental collagist feel and the sense of anarchic
joy.
Part of the problem might be the proverbial "too many cooks spoil
the broth" problem, but more than likely it has to do with the growing
tendency for Nurse With Wound's recent output to sound less like the work
of one author, and more like art-by-committee. I don't know enough about
Steven Stapleton's working methods and artistic process to second guess
the way in which this album was recorded, but compare it to something
like Sylvie and Babs, or even Who Can I Turn to Stereo?, and it's hard
not to notice a marked drop in quality. Where those earlier albums had
a gloriously handcrafted feel, weird musique concrète rubbing shoulders
with mangled samples and surrealistic moments of pure creep-out, Huffin'
Rag can't shake its digital, clinical, overworked feel. A track such as
"Groove Grease (Hot Catz)" is aiming for a dislocated, Yagga
Blues-style take on bebop, but its collection of loops and prefab effects
bring it much closer in effect to 1990s acid jazz and goofy swing/exotica
revivalists like Tipsy or (gasp) Combustible Edison. Only isolated moments
remind one of what the Nurse is usually capable, and they come few and
far between.
Some of thee tracks go on for far too long. "Thrill of Romance...?"
is a case in point, a real patience-tester at more than six minutes of
tepid noodly jazz with the same throbbing synth element repeating through
its entire length. While others may find it hypnotic, I found it annoying.
The vocals provided by Lynn Jackson are capable, but unremarkable, and
it makes me wonder about Stapleton and co.'s mysterious investment in
such an undistinguished singer/songwriter that they used her songs and
lyrics for three of the tracks on Huffin'. "Black Teeth" has
Matt Waldron of irr.app.(ext.) doing some funny Tom Waits/Dr. John-style
vocals, and he actually sounds pretty good, but the cutesy pastiche wears
out its welcome way before it's over. Same with "Crusin' For a Bruisin',"
which attempts to liven up a dull, repetitive loop with occasional traffic
noises and radio chatter.
All is not lost. The album's longest track, "The Funktion of the
Hairy Egg," remains dynamic and interesting for most of its 14-minute
length, traveling from fragmentary jazz blurt, to drone-y krautrock repetition,
to the sounds of several species of furry animals huddled together in
a cave grooving with a pict, and finally to a weird country song lost
in the midst of a Salt Marie Celeste-style cycle of jarring noises. "Juice
Head Crazy Lady" sounds a bit like the Boredoms at their more exotic/electronic
end, tracks like "Jungle Taitei" or the DJ Pica Pica Pica mix
CD; amped-up exotica in a glittery acid wonderland. At its best, Huffin'
Rag Blues hints at a much better album, the album that Stapleton, Liles
and co. probably should have made instead of this one: a more lateral,
abstract take on jazz and swing with less loop-based recording and more
open-ended, improvisatory composition; more ragged, jagged juxtapositions,
rather than the overly smooth, washed-out digital edits that make this
album sound more pedestrian than it should.
Unfortunately, what we get here is overcooked in places, and undercooked
in other places. Mostly, it just seems like Stapleton didn't really push
the concept far enough, and didn't exercise enough control over the proceedings,
so that the final product sounds like an artistic misfire at times, but
mostly like a watered-down compromise. It doesn't share the same unglued,
bizarre surrealism that has made Nurse With Wound one of the most consistently
outré and entertaining sound artists of the post-industrial milieu
for nearly 30 years. There's still more than enough moments of cleverness
on display throughout Huffin' Rag to demonstrate that Stapleton and co.
can easily get back on the horse and make something great again. Until
then, curious listeners are advised to comb online auction sites for reasonably
priced copies of Sylvie and Babs.
PITCHFORK
If Nurse With Wound means anything more to you than "that band that
takes up a whole browser in the 'Industrial/Goth' section of my local
record store," chances are they inhabit a strange place in your collection.
Equally indefinable and uncollectible, Steve Stapleton's Nurse With Wound
have spent the past 30 or so years crafting what sounds like indigenous
music for household appliances. That Stapleton's latest, Huffin' Rag Blues,
has dropped with a silent, drone-y thud even amongst out-music fans is
no real surprise, as even NWW cultists aren't starved for material (e.g.
2005's decidedly under-considered Angry Eelectric Finger is receiving
a double CD/photo book addendum). Huffin' Rag Blues, a collaboration with,
among others, experimental sound artist Andrew Liles, extends Stapleton's
exploration of the bizarre and arcane via tricks like obscure and disorienting
samples and minimal industrial noise-- this time juxtaposed against bop
and swing music.
Huffin' Rag Blues' nods to big band and jazz-- as well as its appropriations
of linear, identifiable grooves-- suggests NWW's 1996 question Who Can
I Turn to Stereo? might be Stapleton literally asking his boombox for
answers (rather than casually pondering who he can transmogrify into a
Sony). The aborted album-opening story of "Willy the Weeper",
a chimney sweep with a dope problem, starts with a januty accompaniment,
and is followed by "Groove Grease (Hot Catz)" and a lounge organ
that surprisingly isn't overrun with angsty noise-niblets until its final
minute. "Thrill of Romance…?" sets a pulsing horn and
spindly Latin guitar work under Freida Abtan's vocals, which sort of sound
like Kim Gordon doing standards. "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'" rolls
a bass-y horn bauble over careening car noises, the noir of Sin City interpreted
as roly-poly funk.
Unfortunately, most of Huffin' Rag Blues is spent accomplishing something
most albums this singular and creative couldn't imagine: boredom. Stapleton
has ideas for miles but the speedometer's fucked. "Wash the Dust
From My Heart" is a straight-played jazz homage replete with a walking
bassline and careful xylophone vibes; that it contains occasional ambient
interruption does not distract from its six-minute runtime. "Advance
single" (ha!) "Ketamineaphonia" opens with a snippet of
ballpark organ before settling into five minutes of hapless beat instruction
and slight orchestral breaks. "Black Teeth" inconceivably bats
around Captain Beefheart congo-skronk, allowing Matt Waldron ample room
for a sub-drug conversation between Satan and, um, a man that wouldn't
have made the cut of a third-grade puppet show ("And Satan says 'Here
comes a storm/ Get off the bus' and the Man says 'Shutup Satan/ Satan
shutup' and Satan says "Here comes another stop/ Get your fat ass
off the bus'"). "Juice Head Crazy Lady" and "The Funktion
of the Hairy Egg" are the most classically NWW tracks here, and while
the former sounds inspiringly deranged for four minutes, "Hairy Egg"
stands as a 14-minute behemoth mercilessly sequenced in the three-hole,
eventually devolving-- predictably, somehow-- into a cacophony of barnyard
noise.
Huffin' Rag Blues should probably get points for distinguishing itself
from the endless string of NWW releases. The cover art-- pressed in a
glossy digipak with colors other than black and photos suggesting things
other than sadistic sex-- basically assures as much. Stapleton's complained
in the past about his releases floating into the ether, but Huffin' Rag
Blues, inspired and deeply flawed, deserves both your consideration and
your dismissal. Stapleton's tireless mind merits as much; he was probably
right to bitch. And if Huffin' Rag Blues isn't wtf/"Things done changed"/NWW
on Demand enough for you, take heart: that Angry Eelectric Finger addendum
is eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.
|
