New Music: Nurse & Soldier, Desert Hearts, My Brightest Diamond

Nurse & Soldier - Back in Yr Corner (Brah 2007)

Nurse & Soldier - Marginalia / Brah

After a long day interviewing at a career fair and looking pretty for the papers, it's back to the dirty business at hand: Writing about albums. Nurse & Soldier appear to be up for this. Marginalia certainly looks elegant enough upon first glance, even if that font recalls Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness. You think I'm kidding, but Nurse & Soldier luckily won't be an album where boys fear to tread. Though the provided information insists Bob Pollard is a major influence and you can indeed sometimes hear it, on tracks like "Back in Yr Corner" the Stereolab listening parties make themselves known. But it's not just Stereolab, because this isn't just some ordinary run-of-the-mill deal. This is Robertson fucking Thatcher, thank you very much (and by that I mean Bobby Matador of Oneida). The vocals are all Erica Fletcher, but beyond that all you really need to know is that there's a little more melody and a little less repetition than the main show up there at Brah (which is related to Jagjaguwar in case you haven't kept your labels straight). You can sort of hear the pop, but the real risks are taken in percussion and in the tinny sound of those organs Oneida loves so much ("Satellightning" is a good example of this). Fletcher's vocals sound like Stereolab when coupled with the right music (and I'm thinking of "Wrong" here), but ultimately Marginalia is not really a direct imitation of any one band. It just sounds like several good ones playing together. There have been many, many worse things in the world.

Wait, what? Pitchfork and PopMatters already did this? It's already in Stereogum's archives? Oh. Whoops. Nevermind.











Desert Hearts - Gravitas (Gargleblast 2006)

Desert Hearts - Hotsy Totsy Nagasaki / Gargleblast

Hotsy Totsy Nagasaki - now there's an album title PopMatters and Pitchfork wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. I know, when I first heard it I thought it was bloody ridiculous too. But it's sort of ridiculous in that 764-HERO kind of way because, really, did "hero" need to be capitalized? I just accept the gimmick and move on because this is a fantastic straightforward "purist" indie record. Not sure why I like the bounce of "D Moon Pilot" or "Ocean" and the slight dirge-with-Sonic Youth-noise effects of "Gravitas," but I do know that sometimes returning from whence you came will uncover new dogs for old tricks. This is one such case. The Belfast, Northern Ireland trio have a dozen songs to their credit on their sophomore album, but this one appears to be better than their debut Let's Get Worse, which was out on Rough Trade. They opened for Peaches. They opened for The White Stripes. They even opened for Bloc Party... But what does that mean without a good album? Don't ask the Mystery Jets. They wouldn't know either.











My Brightest Diamond - Golden Star (Alias remix) (Asthmatic Kitty 2007)

My Brightest Diamond - Tear it Down / Asthmatic Kitty

Add Shara Worden to that list. My Brighest Diamond is her alias and she's enjoyed a tremendous amount of success in the last year. Now she gets the honor of being remixed like a big-timer; hey, everyone else is doing it. What better time than now? If you didn't think Worden sounded like Bjork or Radiohead before, Tear it Down makes for a pretty good case in the best possible way. Wait, hang on, is that Goldfrapp? LCD Soundsystem? This just keeps getting better... She's like all the artists you wished would release material for '07 already (even though Goldfrapp did just come out with a remix album of her own...) rolled into one nice, neat little package. All credit to Asthmatic Kitty though, they did nab some pretty excellent (if not high-profile) remixers. Anticon's Alias is foremost among these, and by starting off the album he sets the agenda, manipulating "Golden Star" into a glitchy, Anticon-esque port o' beat. It's not alone. Alfred Brown's take on "Magic Rabbit" is just as stunning. Who would've guessed My Brightest Diamond would be capable? Nobody paying attention at home, I guess. Ah well. You caught me.

So that sounds like a lot of rockish stuff, doesn't it? Seems kind of half-assed? Getting a bit obvious for you? Yeah, I'm kind of sensing that also. Time for some sleep.