Friday 2 September 2011

reviews; peter wolf crier, water, nurses

Peter Wolf Crier - Garden of Arms

Peter Wolf Crier - Garden of Arms (****)

Peter Wolf Crier’s rustic debut drew comparisons to For Emma, Forever Ago, partly for some slight aesthetic similarities, and partly because the back-story (“born on a single summer night” by an inspired Peter Pisano) struck the same romantic nerve as the whole cabin-in-the-woods thing. To parallelise further, Garden of Arms, like, Bon Iver, carves new crannies in which to play with expectations, with the Minneapolis duo confidently dressing folk-pop bones in added finery.

Right Away is enlivened by errant percussion; Krishnamutri features an Eastern influence (but thankfully wears it lightly); the ornamental rhythms underpinning Hard Heart recall pre-mash-up era Soulwax; while back-tracking tapes on both opener Right Away and the closing Wheel suggest someone’s been giving their Radiohead albums a re-spin. Yet they’re not above a bit of undiluted sentiment: Never Meant to Love You, for instance, is nicely old-fashioned; straightforwardly staged, and all the better for it.

Out 5th September

WATERS - Out in the Light

WATERS - Out in the Light (***)

When Port O’Brien severed ties earlier this year, ending a solid (albeit unspectacular) run, Van Pierszalowski wasted no time upping sticks to Oslo, recruiting a band, and chucking together Out in the Light in a ten day burst.

WATERS (the caps are important, apparently) is broadly stabled with Pierszalowski’s past work, but with extra bite: invigorating opener For the One’s fuzzy punch recalls the much-missed Jay Reatard, while Brendan Benson flickers through the crunchy power-pop of Take Me Out to the Coast.

The latter's title indicates an occasional lack of imagination (see also: San Fransisco, Back to You) while the falsetto refrain in closer Micky Mantle is annoyingly mawkish, but they don’t upset a solid introduction. Out in the Light feels like a transitional record – a testing of the WATERS, so to speak – but find a patch of sunshine to sit in, and it’s just the ticket.

Out 12th September

Nurses - Dracula

Nurses - Dracula (***)

If you find Animal Collective awesome in theory but too obtuse in reality, Nurses offer a safer, less pioneering alternative. They specialise in dub-psych doodles you can whistle along to; swirling exercises in immersive production, but with definite songs at the core. This is both their triumph and their shortcoming; they’re too conventional to astound by dint of experimentation alone, while their prickly sonics thwart gut-level love, resulting in only partial success at each pole.

The band apparently constructed Dracula by “adding one idea on top of another until the sounds became songs”, and perhaps a little subtraction amidst the amassing would have benefited the finished article, with several tracks left to stew in their own liquor. But regardless, there’s much to keep fans happy: the appropriately-titled Fever Dreams sets the tenor with its heady reverb infusion, ensuring Dracula trots a winning furrow in part if not necessarily in whole.

Out 19th September

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