Nurses
Lexington, London
14/09/2010

There we were, all set to go ooh matron, what a carry on etc, when Nurses themselves actually turn up and it becomes immediately apparent that not only is a night of sauce fairly clearly not on the schedule but no, they don’t want no scrubs. Which, of course, isn’t to say that there’s nothing soothing about them – two of them, after all, have beards that would do Bon Iver proud, and oh, those harmonies… it might be an overstatement to say that they make Fleet Foxes sound like Lydon squaring up to Biafra, but only very slightly, and that’s not exactly an everyday occurrence now, is it? Yet  there’s so much more to them than that: it’s not that they can’t do shimmering panoramic Americana on the turn of a twang (‘Technicolor’, for instance, is a splendid early example of this, so much so that we’d be quite happy with an evening of those), but they’ve approached the genre with the glorious concept that, yes, it’s all well and good and folksy, but what if someone was to dive into that particular backwater from a more electronic perspective?

That’s an absolutely fantastic question, and, as it turns out, we’re rather taken with the answers they uncover. Hearing their heavenly-yet-homely coos from behind banks of mechanical mystery is a fabulous exercise in cognitive dissonance, even assisted as it is by some sandcastle-building guitar and drums played with the most concentrated restraint imaginable. And, better still, they’re a long way from resting on the, er, U-ness of their USP, striking out instead for the stars with the result that ‘Man At Arms’ sounds recklessly wrecked in an especially intriguing way, ‘So Sweet’ is a beautifully gentle bob of coyote exhalation, and if anyone told you ‘Lita’ was a lost Brian Wilson number you wouldn’t even think to question them. Clearly, they care a lot, and it shows: Nurses, we’re happy to report, are in nothing but the rudest of health.

Iain Moffat