approximate reading time: minutes
Nancy
The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues
B3SCi Records
Nothing feels more on time in this timeless time than the T. Rex stomp opening the title track of Nancy’s cracked mirror gaze into the void, The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues. Like other glam meditations on the Big Empty (Ziggy Stardust, maybe all Motley Crue recordings) it fills me with life. The music oozes like it is being squoze from a tube to be applied to a rash. Nancy - if the ghastly dude staring back from the cover is the singer in the band is the thing - is grumbly and studio-tortured to the point of near incomprehensibility, but through the static, it is the healing vibe of rock ‘n’ roll - a long dead musical practice about which you might need to consult a village elder or exiled wizard - that bleeds through.
“Pleasure Pen” low watt throbs like Depeche Mode on Nyquil. It got me werqing my shoulders on the treadmill, if you needed that visual. The whole record has a post-human sexuality that grazes the G-spot of a year in isolation. A malaise of having watched every video, every episode, listened to all the podcasts, having even momentarily resorted to reading books like a savage, momentarily massaged into awareness.
Like most smart producers of pop, Nancy has front-loaded their album. “Happy Happy Happy” does the brief busted music box David Lynch vignette waltz. “Leave Your Cares Behind” is as idle an idyll as kids jumping rope in gasmasks, splashing in toxic puddles. The record follows in narcotic rumbles until the Wire-taut “Clic Clac” bangs the earbuds from your virus-clogged bean. It’s a glorious sucker punch, the kind that makes the album for me. The old girl gets as close to contemporary pop practice with the closing “Deathmarch”, built on a loop of church organs that gives some DJ Shadow realness and a beat so compressed it becomes a diamond. It’s a gloomy croon still incomprehensible on this nth listen. I know less about Nancy than I did when I started the record, and I expect that is by design. I’m going to keep this on repeat until she is gone completely.
Choose your poison
Hear more from Nancy here