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REVIEWS
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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.
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