I have to confess I’ve long been a bit of a snob when it comes to American music. On the whole, the lack of subtlety that I find on the surface of American culture has been also turned me off American music and towards the sonic adventures of Europeans, Brits and Australians. So it’s been rather mindset altering for me, over the last 18 months or so, to be blown away by a fairly lengthy string of American artists who have finally caught onto the experiments of rhythm, sound and melody of 90s Europe but are now taking them into new places. Add Nice Nice as the latest in that list, because I’m really loving their debut album, Extra Wow.
There are some obvious (and probably fairly ubiquitous) reference points for Nice Nice’s sound – Animal Collective, Battles, Fuck Buttons et al – but these aren’t claustrophobic or limiting. The basic premise of the Nice Nice sound is focused rhythms underneath unfocused everything else. There’s way too much noise for this to be considered club music, but the robustness of the rhythms (often played live) propel you towards just one thing – dancing. Imagine the lessons learnt from listening to the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’ were corroded down and sandblasted to a much rougher surface, then layers of stray bells and guitars were let free to fly in the surrounding cosmos, and you’d have a reasonable approximation of ‘On And On’. ‘Everything Falls Apart’ is reminiscent of vocal-led Caribou, but with a greater sense of grandeur. There is such density in every track that it can be disorienting, but in the best possible, psychedelic manner. ‘New Cascade’ finds is precedent in The Beatles’ ‘Only A Northern Song’ – pounding tom drums over which flies feedback drones and stray harmelodies.
No-one expects (or should expect) complete originality anymore (surely post-modernism has at least taught us that that modernist expectation is a lie). Nice Nice don’t strive for that. But they do strive for the pinnacle of post-modern creation – the blending of your influences into something you can call your own. In achieving this they also have managed to create a work which is exciting, evocative, propulsive and, at times, melodically catchy. And if the duo can pull off anything with this amount of focused density in a live context, then I can’t wait until they decide to tour these parts. I shall be in the front row.
Adrian Elmer
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