A first for me, i got this tape from checking out a myspace page. Usually i refuse, even bands i totally love, i can't stand listening to myspace tracks, the mp3 quality sucks, the pages make me want to vomit and you're so distracted looking at everything else there's no way my mind can give proper attention to the sounds. So, when i did like one of the tracks and wrote to them to find out about a tape, i was convinced i'd get it and hate it, it just seemed like poetic justice that i would get the tape and it'd sound like shit, thankfully it wasn't.
Turns out this is one of the guys (or more) who was in Big Nurse which i guess is now broke up, i saw them play a pretty good set here in western mass at mystery train records. This tape shares sentiments with the now defunct BN but takes a different route.
Definitely a home-recorded affair, awkward mixing choices, overdriven signals, lost moments, zero engineering and tape hiss are all worn proudly on the sleeve, and i think to their benefit. While it does have a feel to it that it's thrown together at parts it still reveals awesome moments of guitar damage and wiggly drums all woven together, though not without the corresponding moments of clean guitar wires woven through clattering drums. It definitely feels like these guys know how to play underneath the mush and smoosh of their blownout recordings, it's nice they leave it as a suggestion and don't focus too much on showmanship.
The second side has a slight detour into sliding, glazed fields of slowed down tapes, loops and a really nice patterned keyboard that repeats until heading back into the guitar/drum duo where more of their skill sets are revealed definitely suggesting some sort of guitar scales and jazz inflections underneath a wall of spaced out jitters and noisy critters.
not sure if it's still available or not, i just wrote and asked. you could do the same! edition of 24, color printout cover in soft plastic case.
http://www.myspace.com/seriouslyhyped
http://www.highdensityheadache.blogspot.com/
Showing posts with label high density headache. Show all posts
Showing posts with label high density headache. Show all posts
BIG NURSE “Alive II: No Youth Movement Left” (High Density Headache)
Tennessee’s Big Nurse ripped through the West Coast a couple weeks ago playing the sort of mass-mind 6-piece communal art-punk that it seems like most folks out here have given up on (in favor of solo/small projects or song-based stuff). The 3 drummers, 2 guitarist, 1 bass crew shredded one endless, pounding, deafening car crash of glorious noise for 12 minutes, then threw their shit on the floor and were done. Perfect. This tape, however, ain’t really like that. “Alive II” finds BN experimenting with every nook/cranny of their arsenal, resulting in a strange collage of blown out rock wanderings, sparse practice-taped vagueness, and overt noise wastelands. The live unity/cohesion vision has been ditched in favor of endless homeless amplified teenage puke. Which, suffice to say, has a different charm all its own. Maybe not essential listening, but definitely an authentic slab of unedited weirdo southern psych-trash, appropriate for many fucked/desperate occasions.
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