Monday, October 01, 2007

Hell no, I don't want to go

Ninja
Image: Dan-ah Kim

Capture the Flag - Nurse & Soldier

Maybe because I spent a big chunk of sunny Sunday watching The War, I half expected a band called Nurse & Soldier to offer lovelorn Bing Crosby croons or Andrews Sisters' style pep talks. Or perhaps clipped Ernest Hemingway-like rhetoric about courage and sacrifice and victory. Nope. N&S (an Oneida sideproject) makes emotionally ambivalent, vaguely noirish (gris, then?) electro pop that was long-since defeated, but is also totally at peace with that. "Capture the Flag" is a tense, churning, fuzzed-out almost-dance track--almost, because its tight coil never quite unwinds. Its implied kinesis is a tease; every time you expect the song's jitter to launch into a four-on-the-floor rave-up, the droning static organ seems to rein it in. It's like the song's going to reenact
Rockie's dispassionately sung "climbing up the hill, climbing up the mountain" over and over, but never reach the top. "Capture" then, is ideal for this in-between month of natural and psychological indecision, a time to tuck in limbs and build a fortress of pillows.

From Marginalia (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace.

2 Comments:

Blogger C. said...

How is "The War"? I'm wound up deleting all the eps that had piled up in my Tivo, figuring that i'll watch the DVDs at some point. I've always had a soft spot for Ken Burns, even at his cheesiest (though parts of "jazz" were horrific), but I think i'm perhaps maxed out on Greatest Generation nostalgia (as orchestrated by their aging children) right now.

chris

8:07 PM  
Blogger Amy said...

The series is tolerably good for the archival footage, and the attention payed to action in the Pacific theater (a lot of stuff I didn't know). But I'm not a fan of the Burnsian talking heads, particularly when they're weeping into the camera. Amazing how fast his style became a stale self-parody, huh?

Seconded on Greatest Generation fatigue. I'm almost as sick of that story as the one about the Boomers stopping the war in Vietnam. Bleh.

10:03 AM  

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