Nurses:
Apple's Acre

Nurses

Label: Dead Oceans






When some groups cite bands as influences, it can almost guarantee they don't sound similar. Think Sonic Youth. Think Velvet Underground. These artists made a mark on countless kids who went on to form countless bands, yet when you get down to it, how many groups actually sound like them? Somewhere around Sung Tongs, Animal Collective entered this exclusive club. A band would spring up in Brooklyn, the blog buzz would begin and then you'd see it on their MySpace page, right after Sun Ra or some nonsense: Animal Collective. What then is so influential about Animal Collective? Perhaps more than anything it's the song structures and the atmosphere. This is what Nurses seem to have decided to explore with Apple's Acre.

It's easy to imagine that the kids in Nurses heard Animal Collective and took that group's Beach Boys obsession more seriously than most. At a band meeting, maybe they played Sung Tongs and agreed it needed more room. Maybe the voices begged to be clearer, closer to the forefront. The percussion had to take a backseat. The synths had to become cleaner. Before long, the only similarities were the cascading vocals, the eerie call-and-response chants falling from the sky and the structures that enabled them to work.

Apple's Acre is full of room, giving itself space to stretch. With almost no low end, twinkling piano lines are often the only melodic accompaniment to the voices. This is a good thing. Rather than sounding like a watered-down Merriweather Post Pavilion, Apple's Acre is an intriguing depiction of the sound one imagines Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were attempting to achieve all those years ago, filtered through the lens of someone who has only heard the root inspiration through an act separated from it by nearly half a century. It is alien but still comforting in its closeness to home.

A sense of 'home' is of course a key concept within the framework of Apple's Acre. It is a medium quality recording with the hiss of a home set-up apparent on several tracks. The vocals are indeed clear, but the drums or drum machines or samples (whatever the specific tracks calls for) sound degraded, like hand-me-downs from the cooler older brother. The keyboards surely must have been recorded in the bathroom. The handclaps are not in time- which is actually for the best. On "Lita," the entire background is flooded with white noise and the sounds of liquid dripping, maybe on the basement floor, maybe in the kitchen sink. The atmosphere this provides is at once creepy and lulling; is the narrator the kind of lover from a Todd Solondz film or is he just heartbroken, incapable of letting his emotions remain hidden?

Something sweeter takes the center of "Orange Cymbals," where the song seems more like the happy emotional climax that Dancer in the Dark did not have, its percussion hurtling towards the sunset like a train, vocals rising and falling in step. Earlier, "Caterpillar Playground" could even loosely be labeled a sing-a-long single, with its Seven Dwarfs whistling and charming tambourines flirting with the lone synth arpeggios. It's a brother to Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks," more chaotic, yes, but an equally strong summer single. It also works to buoy the album after the slower introduction by the needlessly café-sounding "Technicolor" and the Dan Deacon-aping "Mile After Mile." With "Caterpillar Playground," Apple's Acre comes fully into its own, tumbling playfully into the nearly a cappella "Manatarms" before the title track offers another glimpse of pop's possible future.

On Apple's Acre, Nurses show that influence is often more a challenge than a blueprint. Though they share Animal Collective's interest in structure and melody, they wield the influence like a scalpel instead of a crutch, carving out what works for them and what doesn't until what's revealed is something all its own. It's a promising work, its uniqueness not too strange to keep listeners at bay and its similarities to its influences remaining mostly theoretical. But beyond all that, it's simply fun, catchy and weird and full of the types of sounds that make even a jaded listener's ears prick up.

by Morgan Davis