The idea of dual percussionists battling out on the skins perhaps reached its fruition first on Buddy Guy and Gene Krupa's 1952 Drum Battle LP, which featured a track of the same name in which the two drummers go wild (well, as relatively wild as things got back then) in a good-natured precursor to the MC and DJ battles of recent years. In a sense, Nervous Cop's debut, self-titled release is a modern manifestation of Drum Battle, though with less emphasis on any sort of competition.
The offspring of the musical union of Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Hella's Zach Hill, Nervous Cop is more of a one-off recording project or sonic experiment than a proper band. Hill's classification of the music as musique concrete really isn't all that far off, as there's very little music on this disc that's allowed to bleed through, naked and unchanged, to the listener's ears. Saunier and Hill recorded drum tracks together, but quickly decided to change courses, and, at different stages of the CD's development, Joanna Newsom was brought in to augment the music on harp, Deerhoof's John Dietrich added electronics, and the music was remixed, remade, and remodeled again and again. The results are surprisingly disparate. Newsom's opening cascade of harp immediately puts things in a celestial light that's almost just as immediately dissolved by furious drumming. There are times at which the disc sounds like two drummers pounding away, but, at other times, it sounds more like the glitchy, twisted beats of a forward-looking IDM album or a composition by any one of numerous classical composers to inject electronics into their art.
Such a conceptual statement might not be what Saunier and Hill set out to make, but, after months of transformation, that's what this album has become. The idea of the disc being simply an album made by two drummers is a notion that was obliterated early on in its development, and, at this point, the drumming on the album is often nothing more than the base material for the later transformations and mutilations that take precedence on much of the CD. Saunier and Hill, the drummers, are no longer the focal point of Nervous Cop's music, though their percussion output fuels much of the music. That's an interesting concept to be sure, and one that holds up surprisingly well throughout much of the disc.
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