If indie rock has become, for the most part, an endlessly rotating set of established signifiers in 2009, then
Nurses' second album,
Apple's Acre, is perfectly at home in it all, skipping amid everything from bits of electronic echo and glitch to clap-along sentiments to cracked-voice ruminations on home and love -- and all this within the first song, "Technicolor," so if nothing else the band knows how to put all the pieces together from the start. But from there, as with far too many acts in the field, things barely vary -- having learned their lessons all too well from acts like
the Flaming Lips and
the Decemberists,
Arcade Fire and
Animal Collective,
Nurses proceed to provide exactly what is expected of them and what their audience presumably expects. There are big sentiments and big singing, swathes of reverb and senses of vast spaces, twinkling keyboards and crashing bells, an emphasis of treble over bass on all fronts. If there was more to remark on, more that provided an individual stamp, then there would be more to say -- but if
Nurses are content to be the new
Supertramp like so many other of the acts that have come before them, then let them have at it at their leisure. But little surprise if many listeners would tire and look elsewhere. ~ Ned Raggett