Nudge: As Good As Gone

Writing about music makes dissection a very common listening perspective, as does being a musician. Sometimes I find myself decimating a recording; isolating influences, techniques and words to the extent that the overall result is stopped in its tracks.

That’s an inevitable result of long-term exposure to anything, from art to cookery to conversation. The upside of this accumulation, or transition perhaps, are those occasions when something comes along that is overwhelmingly refreshing and intriguing. As exciting as music ever was. 

Just when you start to feel a little numb, an assemblage of sound, of flavour and texture, of visual symbol and light, takes shape and creates an experience that circumnavigates the surgeon and animates the corpse. This new record from Nudge has done just that for me over the past couple of days, but I have the underlying certainty that it will retain its power even if I were to get a firmer aural grip on its elements over time.

I got nervous about reviewing it, feeling uncertain of calling this bass line ‘dub’, this beat ‘glitch’ or this guitar line ‘funky’ by virtue of my lack of exposure to the genres that I am supposing this group have drawn influence from. It’s also hard to review something this compelling, I feel that even the previous sentence has condemned your potential meeting with this music to an unrealistic and two dimensional spectrum, albeit until you actually hear it, akin to explaining a dream that leaves behind a powerful and abiding sense or feeling but little definable detail.

When it begins, with a wheezing concertina and the liquid plucks of an Mbira (or thumb piano) I imagined myself to be on the cusp of another psych-folk album made up of quaint instrumentation and “organic” drones. It builds upon this typically beautiful surge but by the songs conclusion it has introduced a defining character of the record to come: a slippery lysergic twisting, a reflex that wrenches the music out of the grasp of prettiness and continues to trip it’s way to a beauty of a different magnitude. It’s part body-snatching psychedelia, part goth, part soul, and all quasi-ambient. But don’t confuse that with relaxing, it just so happens to enervate physical stillness, which to me is a very different thing. It’s also kinda sexy…

Although this group is defined as the project of Brian Foote, it also bears the mark of Paul Dickow, Jon Pyle and my favourite fuzzy adventuress, Honey Owens (whose last release as Valet I reviewed here). Being familiar with her work I can identify her contributions; light, woozy and expansively dreamy vocals which sound ripe for (and perhaps influenced by) sampling, were they not bound up in this intertwined matter which is at times a thicket, at times a jungle and at others a wind. That and she brings her trademark wah-wah guitar that sounds as gloriously fucked up as ever; it lends an edge or steers you into an unexpected diversion at many crucial moments, when the drift threatens to lose momentum and sink. The digitised cat-fight snippets that she bends forth on ‘Tito’ are a personal favourite, particularly alongside those fat squelches…

But it is that drift at the heart of the record which allows such sonic activity to exert its pull on me. ‘Aurolac’ is carried along by a clean heartbeat, err, is that beat a glitch? A spidery shoegaze guitar wobbles through what sounds like analogue tape processing, sitting back in the mix with the similarly contextualised vocals. The sparse bursts from the bass guide you through the paralysis while myriad guitar voices and scratched up grainy percussion make welcome intrusions and sudden exits. At just over six and a half minutes it knows just when to leave.

‘Burns Blue’ makes me wonder why anyone has the nerve to say that the Dead Weather can smoulder, this is a song for those of us who can’t leave the embers till they’re all dead and the summoning is done. Okay it’s not sexy in the conventional boy-girl blues hip-thrust vein, but is that even sexy? I guess to some people touch is all about watching touch, or being seen to touch. This kind of music is touch.

Can’t leave this review without describing the effect ‘Dawn Comes Light’ had on me yesterday. The lone guitar that starts it all (albeit in the company of some shivering hiss) is all Dead Can Dance meets Amnesiac meets Robert Fripp. This is an album to listen to straight through. I don’t care about the playlist generation, they can shatter their attention spans for change to buy their titillating trip on the merry-go-round and I’ll keep mine intact. The thirty minutes that precede the nine minute closer have an unclassifiable effect on this song.

It lifted me up and over the landscape I had been through and, well, for want of a better word and for a love of the sublimely crude, it blew me away man. And it scared me with its connectivity, with its surging, irrepressible intimacy. As Good As Gone makes the alien intimate, in an age where alienation has become the goal. That’s big talkin’, and I know it sounds ridiculous, but it doesn’t feel so.