Nurse With Wound - Funeral Music for Perez Prado
(United Dairies)
This is a collection of previously released, now out-of-print releases, the Yagga Blues and Soresucker EPs, that compiles four outstanding tracks and one pretty good one, for a total of 78 minutes of very diverse music. This is part of what makes Nurse With Wound so exciting: each record is a crapshoot. One is never quite sure what one is going to get. One may be certain, however, that it will not be boring.
The first two tracks are "Yagga Blues," taken from the stellar Who Can I Turn to Stereo, and an instrumental mix of the same track. For Nurse With Wound, purveyors of what they refer to as "cod surrealism," this is a very straightforward titled track. "Yagga Blues" mixes several layers of hand played percussion, with a decidedly "eastern" feel, with a very soulful and deep female vocal track, and some eerie electronics that float in and out of the background. It's exotic, entrancing, and otherworldly, and one of Nurse With Wound's most accessible and groove-oriented pieces. The instrumental mix is exactly that, nothing new. The lack of vocals, however, allows the listener to focus more on the interplay of the rhythm tracks, and get a better feel for the texture of the track. Both together are about ten minutes, so having one right after the other does not wear one out on the music.
The record immediately shifts gears on the third track, "Funeral Music for Perez Prado (full version)," which is 33 minutes of ambient electronic tones. The music is very amorphous, with minimal melodic and rhythmic forms, but a regular and discernable ebb and flow that creates the feeling of rising slowly, floating and rising again. Based on the title, one wonders if the intent was to create a transcendent state, like that of the soul leaving a body. Music like this is the most difficult to describe as its effect is so largely one of purely emotional impact. I will just say that it is the most successful and satisfying piece of music on this record, and it has become one of my favorite Nurse With Wound tracks. Given its unwieldy length, it demands a greater devotion than most music, but it rewards in kind.
Sadly, however, that means the remainder of the record is downhill. Next up is "I am the Poison," which is by no means a bad song, but does tend to pale just a tiny bit in comparison to what has come before it. This song is lifted from the great and bizarre Sugar Fish Drink, Stephen Stapleton's (who is Nurse With Wound) fruitful collaboration with John Balance of Coil. It's a strange and simple track, built around a repetitive two-note bass sequence and Balance's mystic chants. It's his voice which lends the track its power, and he ominously intones a bizarre hymn that seems to draw inspiration from the Gnostic text, "Thunder: Perfect Mind" (which previously inspired an entire album of the same name by Nurse With Wound). About halfway through this track, guitar buzz and squeals and other unnerving sounds begin to overtake the solemn space of the earlier portions of the song, which creates the impression of a decent into madness. This is an interesting track in the way it straddles Nurse With Wound's earlier and later periods: it owes a debt to their earlier experiments with noise and chaos, but greatly benefits from the later work's increased emphasis on structure and control of mood.
The last track, "Journey Through Cheese," would be much better if it were somewhere in the neighborhood of less than half of its 23 minute length. There is simply not enough in this song to justify its length. It's an "industrial" piece in the sense that it sounds like one is standing in the midst of a very well-coordinated industrial facility, all clanks and clangs, buzz and static, plus some squealing cats. It's a very well constructed piece of music, and it's fun to pick stuff out, some processed feedback here, a line printer there, but could have been just as effective at a quarter of its length. Its too bad too, because after such an impressive collection of songs which has preceded it, "Journey Through Cheese" takes on the feel of filler, which is unnecessary when the music is otherwise so good.
If you have ever wondered what the hell is up with Nurse With Wound, this is a great record to start with. It's filled with great music and gives one a good sense of the various different personalities at work within the head of Mr. Stapleton. And even if you haven't wondered that, this record stands as a good explanation of why you should.
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