Nurse With Wound – A Sucked Orange/Scrag

Dirter

Really glad to get a proper chance to listen to this again – disc rot, the scourge of so many early World Serpent gems (the un-initiated should see here) and barmy auction prices have totally scuppered my chances to get re-acquainted with its Frankensteined charms until now. Dirter, those bastions of the unusual, have done a sterling job of dragging A Sucked Orange back into the light with silky packaging that feels almost fetishistic, paring the bitter sweetness of the original together with the Scrag cassette on a second disc, another compilation (or should that be complication) of mis-shapes from around the same period. Overlapping content that acts like a remix of the first disc, embellished in extra wilting petals…

Like a Nurse with Wound variety pack, A Sucked Orange is a zesty, ill mannered 29-tracker, a compendium for the attention deficit that breezes through your speakers in contrasty jolts. Either plain silly, creepily disconcerting or falling into an unclassifiable between, like the expanse of corridor from the Beatles‘ Yellow Submarine, it has a parade of fresh surprises awaiting you behind each unopened door. This is a lucky dip of musical debris – jovial banjo and squeaky dog toys rubbing shoulders with unhinged hag-like cackles from Chrystal Belle Scrodd (Steve Stapleton‘s partner since the ’80s). You quickly gather there’s no rhyme or reason to the contents, you’ve just got to enjoy the ride, a mescaline of miscellanea that’s bristling with numerous highlights – lots of tantalising idea cauldrons and offcuts of vintage Nurse to savour.

From the gasping desire factory of “I’m a Frayed Knot,” with its warm milky surrenders bristling on a beaty backbone, to the simple pleasures of “Scissor Rock Bicycle Revelation,” a disco of snipping and spoked metal slowly covered in watery treacles, there’s no shortage of surreal algebras to choose from. The album’s full of soft needles that gleefully poke around in the dark like the parasitic clamber of ‘Flea Bite’s” toothy contour crabs chewing your sub-conciseness. The Icelandic/Nordic nursery rhyme of “Rita Sings for the World” breaking out in nervy ritualised orgasms and masturbatory exorcisms, feisty intercourses that recur throughout both discs as if trying to work loose new formulas. There’s even a touching piece of folksy balladry from the man himself on “Raymonde Cries a River.” Some tracks do your head right in, (in a good way) the repeater glitch of “Rocket Morton” is a good example, an annoyance mantra buckling and warping into new slippages until it’s brainwashing you Moonies style… the lesser repeater of “It Just Ain’t So,” with its later Coenobite chatter of an Argento doll.

That Toucan-headed, Vladimir Tretchikoff oily exotic on the cover fits beautifully with the contents; that scrying eye staring straight out at you, surrounded by a pinky rawness , those obsidian depths, the blackout of the fatally fallen. A shiver of Jan Švankmajer disturbia, as you soak up the more sinister dishes on offer; as if that face could turn at any moment and snap its bony bill…

By the time the album finishes on the soft malfunctions of “Scrambled Egg Rebellion in the Smegma Department” and those impressions of a ripe kidney on a bendy Uri Geller fork begin to fade you, definitely feel the need to start this bizarre journey all over again.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-