Nurse With Wound - Dark Fat 3xLP

Label: Dirter Promotions

"... a sprawling collection of 'live' recordings ranging from rehearsals to sound checks to actual gigs. Despite its dubious hodge-podge origins, Dark Fat actually feels an awful lot like a studio album–quite a damn good one, even. While longtime NWW fans will probably experience many flickers of recognition over the course of these two hours, Stapleton and his collaborators have so thoroughly reshaped and recontextualized everything that it all feels fresh, vibrant, inspired and appropriately disorienting all over again.

The best way to summarize this album is to say that it feels like Steven Stapleton assembled an entire village-worth of like-minded artists for a very abstract and cavalier traipse through some of NWW's greatest hits. In a way, I suppose that is exactly what he did, but the twist is that it was a very fitful, slow-motion, and 'revolving door' process that spanned six years. In any case, aside from the core group of Stapleton, Colin Potter, Matt Waldron and Andrew Liles, Dark Fat features a head-spinning roster of avant-garde luminaries in cameo roles ranging from Jacques Berrocal to Stephen O'Malley to James Blackshaw. As if that were not enough, it also features some unwitting contributions from Klaus Schulze, Michael Schenker and Cream's Jack Bruce (if the roll call during the final untitled track is to be believed). Clearly, even the deceased were clamoring to get in on this party. Naturally, that deranged eclecticism extends to the instrumentation as well, covering everything from Hawaiian guitars to saxophones to cornets to smoke bombs. Given all that, it is unsurprising that Dark Fat is a deliciously difficult album to wrap my head around, as it is massive, freewheeling and kaleidoscopic in the extreme.

Dark Fat is essentially an unexpectedly brilliant editing tour de force, masterfully distilling a large part of NWW's bizarre and wide-ranging legacy into richly textured fever dream of an album." – Anthony D'Amico / Brainwashed