Nurse With Wound / Current 93 - Nylon' Coverin' Body Smotherin'

This split release with Current 93 shows a newer side of Nurse with Wound, the side that involves vocals. Embracing people singing words and not just screaming or howling, head Nurse Steven Stapleton brings Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell into the fold to sing on the title track. Thirlwell, for his part, sounds like a rabid attack dog, spitting his words, sounding a lot like he does on earlier Foetus records. Lyrically, he's just above unintelligible, but as part of one of the most straightforward NWW tracks, with its pulsing organ and various noises punctuating the "groove," Thirlwell's contribution is immensely exciting. Incongruously, the Current 93 track "The Great in the Small" follows, a slow build-up of sparse hammering, chanting, and David Tibet saying and eventually screaming "Antichrist." It's a bit silly. "Chicken in Drag" rounds out the first half, credited as "a token Sylvie and Babs Ditty," a reference to a group of collaborators known as the Murray Fontana Orchestra that Stapleton would head up on The Sylvie and Babs High-Thigh Companion. The track here is based around samples from the theme to television's Dragnet, sped up and slowed down -- not that interesting. The remaining three tracks, all NWW, cover familiar ground in the early NWW catalog, suitably noisy and surreal, but not all that great, making this a somewhat minor footnote in the Nurse canon.