At various points during my music-listening career, I have gotten quasi-obsessed with the idea of a certain band or artist without having developed any deep affection for a particular album or work. John Zorn and Merzbow come to mind. Thankfully I only got two Zorn albums before losing interest, but I nearly ended up with a massive box set of his avante-garde and potentially unlistenable "Game Pieces" - I went so far as bidding on it on Ebay. With Merzbow I downloaded a couple albums and really liked it, and then bought 3 albums in close succession (and nearly a fourth as well; its out-of-print nature a temptation). Since then I haven't found one occasion to listen to Merzbow for longer than 5 minutes.
When I started this blog I was just getting into Nurse with Wound. I was intrigued by what I had heard, and even more so what I had read about their vast discography. Concurrently, I discovered Amazon's (awesome) textbook buyback program, and traded in a stack of books with the intention of immediately spending a sizable chunk of my $225 haul on NWW releases, including the 3-CD ambient box Soliloquy for Lilith. In the weeks between mailing the books and receiving the money, my enthusiasm cooled a bit and I didn't follow through. For several months after, I regarded that as another very-close-call with impulsive purchases of experimental music dust-collectors.
In the last few months I've rediscovered the NWW albums I had, and been surprised to find that they are legitimately becoming one of my favorite "bands" (scare quotes since NWW is basically just Steven Stapleton and whomever he brings along) . If Zorn was the person responsible for making me think experimental music was nothing but pretentious BS for several years, Stapleton is the one responsible for showing me that it can be fun.
The latest addition to my NWW collection is Rock 'n Roll Station. Whereas most NWW falls somewhere between ambience and sound collages, the songs on Rock 'n Roll Station actually have a beat. While the action of each song still lies in subtly shifting atmospherics with punctuated bursts of found-sound and assorted instruments, each is accompanied by a stubbornly repetitive - yet nearly danceable - layer of electronic drums.
I'm told that this uncharacteristic inclusion caused some fans to decry the album as being more "accessible".
The title track opens the album, and grabbed me as soon as I first heard it. It's a sort of spoken-word poem backed by a catchy beat and various other sounds which skillfully interplay with the vocals. Like all NWW songs containing words, these are absurd, impenetrable, and in my estimation, awesome. The track is responsible for me walking around all week with phrases in my head like "Jack's bicycle is music to my ears" and "Rock 'n roll session is a second pirate session of a strange wax".
Words take a less prominent role on the rest of the tracks, but each finds its own way to be distinctive - from the didgeridoo jam on "Two Golden Microphones" (probably the only example in my collection) to the jangly, fractured guitar riffing of "R+B Through Collis Browne".
With the first couple NWW albums I listened to, I felt intrigued but didn't really understand what the band was all about. Homotopy to Marie and most of Spiral Insana gave me the idea that they were practitioners of purely abstract sound manipulation, but then I was confounded by the appearance of scattered sections of conventionally melodic piano. Then I listened to An Awkward Pause and was confronted by "Two Shaves and a Shine", an unabashed rock-guitar based jam session. Eventually I've come to terms with the fact that NWW isn't really about anything - there's seemingly no limit to what you might be greeted with on one of their albums. The only thing you can count on is a meticulous attention to detail and a tongue-in-cheek attitude that keeps the invariably obscure proceedings grounded and entertaining. Well, relative to Zorn anyway.
