Labels: Gringo
Review by: Alex Deller
Go a fair amount of admiration for a band who can latch onto an annoying idea and hammer away at it until they reach a point of strange, bewildering purity. Nape Neck achieve this giddy feat with scratchy guitars, wobbly basslines and schoolyard sing-song, coming across like The Fall and Swell Maps by way of No New York or The Au Pairs and Ut via Beefheart. It’s awkward, difficult, jittery music of a type that’s impossible to accomplish anything to … you can’t write a letter or do your tax return while it plays in the background, and you certainly can’t use it to soundtrack the construction of an intricate matchstick model of Saint Paul’s Cathedral unless you want to feel compelled to blind yourself with a kitchen knife. Rather you just have to sit there, suck it up and grit your teeth while it all plays out, only to mystifyingly set it spinning again as soon as things have finished. What the fuck have they done?