Nurses - Apple's Acre (Album)

There’s something quite romantic (clichéd as it may be) in the image of musicians wandering the highways of the USA in search of somewhere to settle to record their masterpiece. Probably aware of this, Nurses’ core constituents Aaron Chapman and John Bowers did their fair share of roaming before picking up drummer James Mitchell, settling in Portland, Oregon, and emptying their toybox on the floor to produce Apple’s Acre.

The record is a patchwork of the most gorgeous type of euphoric but bruised pop. The most instantly recognisable thing about Nurses is Chapman’s voice, which flits back and forth between a strangled Joanna Newsom and Avey Tare at his most rasping. The swelling and soaring of the vocals regularly lift the songs to emotional highs. They also convey a real vulnerability which is at times at odds with the melodies chirruping away under the surface, never more so than on ‘Caterpillar Playground’.

Such distinctive vocals put serious pressure on a band to provide suitably interesting instrumentation. With such a powerful instrument so readily on display, the whole thing might have fallen a bit flat without a strong supporting framework. Happily, Nurses’ are more than up to this challenge, as they pack Apple’s Acre with rickety piano, overbearing organ and electronic flourishes, dousing the whole thing in blissful melody.

One of the most interesting and fulfilling things about Apple’s Acre is its sense of fluidity. It’s a living, breathing thing and just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it wanders off in a different direction like a mischievous child. It hints at this on opening track ‘Technicolor’, which is a journey in itself. It starts off with just Chapman’s voice at its most fearful and affecting, before mutating into a joyously twisted party atmosphere.

From then on, the album follows a similarly unpredictable course, veering between the pained and visceral (‘Mile After Mile’, ‘Winter’), deranged torch songs (‘Bright Ideas’) and sheer unbridled elation (‘Apple’s Acre’). The latter is one of the album’s real highlights, and comes as a wonderful surprise the first time you hear it, imbued as it is with that sense of urgency and gleeful harmonies that you would associate with the best pop songs of the 60s.

As full as their songs are, Nurses also understand the value of being concise. It comes as a surprise the first time you realise that Apple’s Acre clocks in at only thirty five minutes, because it feels like there’s enough content here to fill at least an hour. Brevity is perhaps a virtue here. It’s difficult to imagine such a joyful album ever dragging on, but it’s a clever stroke from Nurses to ensure that it never gets a chance to outstay its welcome.

Apple’s Acre is a tale of ambitions realised. Nurses set out to create a storybook of childish innocence, and they’ve achieved that. The album showcases their massive creativity and playfulness and is a fitting testament to the power of pop music to move your heart and head as well as your feet.

9/10

Idlewild - 100 Broken Windows (Album)

My contribution to a collective 'Best Albums of the Decade' feature which is due to appear on Muso's Guide:

As tricky a question as it is, I’d say the album which has meant the most to me this decade is 100 Broken Windows by Idlewild. The album was one of my first forays away from the Oasis, Travis, Stereophonics triumvirate which clogged the early-noughties hit parade, and opened up a gateway away from chart indie.

My love for this record isn’t just fuelled by nostalgia though. Even nine years later, no other British Indie band has matched it for energy, impact and sheer listenability.

It’s easy to understand why this is regarded by so many as a seminal album. . Roddy’s lyrics might straddle the line between intelligence and nonsense, (“…and Gertrude Stein said that’s enough!”) but that doesn’t matter at all, because 100 Broken Windows is powered along by incendiary (and bloody catchy) guitar riffs, and resonates with a glorious and barely contained rage.

100 Broken Windows marked Idlewild’s first steps from raggy-arsed punk slashers into something a little more refined. They might eventually have gone too far down the road to maturity, but at this stage Idlewild were still one of the most exciting bands in the world.

Omo - The White Album (Album)

Very occasionally, an album arrives which leaves us scratching our heads. An album which, in spite of repeated listens, does not open itself up or click into place. An album which you just don’t quite know what to make of. The White Album by Omo is such an album.

Omo are a two piece outfit consisting of Berit Immig and David Muth, They’ve been playing together for about five years, and this, their debut long player, is an assemblage of what they describe as ‘domestic pop for domestic occasions’. And it’s an unbelievably frustrating listen.

There’s absolutely no doubt that Omo possess unbounded creativity and flair. The White Album a lesson in exemplary electro textures. There is no shortage of ideas lurking among the exquisite concoction of beats and lo-fi instrumentation. Penultimate track ‘Turtle Neck’, for example, marries a looped guitar line to a pounding electronic pulse and the result, although hardly anything new, is still something vitaland invigorating. ‘König’ is an edgy, atmospheric piece of music which shows a creepier facet to the band’s sound.

Sadly though, Omo give with one hand and take away with the other. The most exasperating thing about The White Album is the handling of the ‘zany’ subject matter of the lyrics which ranges from underwater robots, to making a cuppa, to why birds couldn‘t fly if their eggs were too heavy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with humour in music. If Neil Hannon can pull off a whole album about cricket, then why shouldn’t Omo be able to give us a song about tennis? The key is in the way the songs are delivered. There’s precious little warmth in Immig’s spoken word vocal delivery, which means the absurdity of the songs just sounds forced.

However, there are one or two instances where the Casio-pop aligns perfectly with the vocals, and, not surprisingly, these are among the album’s most successful moments. We see it on ‘Oversized’, where the mantra-like chant of “Will you be surprised when I’m oversized?” combines nicely with the hypnotic beat. It’s a shame that these moments of lucidity are few and far between, because underneath the wackiness is a brilliant album of painstakingly constructed bedroom electro desperate to make itself heard.

Lights - Rites (Album)

Rites is the second album by Brooklyn quartet-of-sorts Lights. We say ‘of-sorts’, because the fourth member of the band, Wizard Smoke, doesn’t actually play a note on the record, but contributes artwork and visuals for their live shows.

It may seem a bit of an outlandish concept to credit as a band member a person with no input on the recordings, but in the case of Lights, it makes a perverse kind of sense. The ethos here is that of a joyful collective, a band playing purely for themselves. The songs which constitute Rites progress at entirely their own pace, building a mood which is free from any kind of inhibitions.

The record is powered by the dual forces of the fallen angel vocal harmonies of Sophia Knapp and Linnea Vedder, and some proper old fashioned grubby stoner rock. It straddles the line between girlish sweetness, and heavy wooziness, which produces an end result which is as fun as it is stirring.

Rites’ fun side is borne out of the playfulness which is present on the album from start to finish. It’s there in the sleazy horns on ‘Can You Hear Me’, which, from most other bands would be a bit too on the nose. It’s also there in vast quantities on ‘Fire Night’. Take a throbbing bassline, some spoken word (or growled-word, to be more accurate) male French vocals, some heavy psychedelic guitars, mix in some suggestive girly cooing, and you’ve got a prime recipe for some wonderfully filthy stoner-disco.

For all the prettiness of the vocals, there’s a deliciously devilish air underpinning them throughout. On ‘Hold On’, for example, the refrain of "hold on, my little darling" is more than just a rallying cry to a loved one, it’s a siren-call shot through with wickedness. As well as this, the aforementioned ‘Fire Night’ puts paid to any notions of innocence suggested by the ever so slightly tongue in cheek white-robe clad images of the band in the artwork.

The main focal point of Rites, an album hardly lacking in highlights, is it’s second-last song ‘Nothing Left to Build’. It’s the song which encapsulates Lights’ philosophy best, summing up exactly what they’re about in a shade over four minutes. A gentle, simple guitar melody lifts into more of those beautiful harmonies, underpinned by some delicate fuzziness. The whole thing feels like at any moment it might soar off skywards, dragging you eagerly along with it.

So with Rites, Lights might well have delivered (dare we say it) one of 2009’s best records. There’s so much to enjoy here. It is an album which is driven by a duality of dark and light, of beauty and force, all of which make it such an enriching and substantial listen.

Emmy the Great - The Edward EP (EP)

So many dozens of great records are made each year that it’s quite easy not to think about those that will never see the light of day. But on reflection, it’s both intriguing and disturbing that we’ll never know just how much we end up missing out on from artists who might run out of steam, abandon their work in a fit of pique, or just wander off down another channel entirely.

Take Emmy the Great’s The Edward EP, as a prime example. In playing previously overlooked old songs in her encores on a recent tour, her nostalgic instincts were stirred to the extent that she decided to commit four of them to tape as a kind of prequel to her debut album First Love (though not, by her own admission, before having to double-check some of her lyrics online, so far to the back of her mind had these songs been cast).

The fact that these wonderful songs were discarded before even being recorded speaks volumes about the quality of what did end up making it on to the album. But perhaps Emmy was selling her earliest work a little short, because at times The Edward EP surpasses parts of First Love, particularly on its lead track ‘Edward is Dedward’.

The themes of death, loss and regret beset the songs, but even in the face of such heavy subject matter, Emmy’s typically sharp turn of phrase and delicately bouncy strum-alongs stave off any threat of mawkishness. On ‘Edward is Dedward’ for example, she imbues a bleak tale of mourning with a touching sense of defiance: ‘If burial restricts your view / I’ll bring the city here to you’. The folky opening of the song builds into something noisier, akin to the atmosphere of drunken revelry that gradually permeates a funeral and turns it into a celebration.

There are plenty of examples of the ability of Emmy to interweave poignancy with knowing wit which was often apparent on First Love. ‘Canopies and Drapes’ (no, it’s definitely not Grapes) recounts a tricky break-up sound-tracked by New Kids on The Block, Billy Bragg and stolen Magnetic Fields Eps and which results in predictably regrettable drunken episodes and feeling ‘worse than when S Club 7 broke up’. The same song also contains such beautiful imagery as a longing to ‘teach the mattress to erase you from its folds’.

Emmy has recently talked about how recording these songs has revived her love of song writing. The act of releasing this EP, far from being the backwards step it could be construed as, should have a positive impact on her next album. Given the quality of what she’s released so far, this is a seriously exciting prospect.

8/10