Low fidelity is my mistress. I always come back to her no matter how much I enjoy hearing any other sort of music. Yet I'm aware that at low fidelity's extremes it is certainly an acquired taste, one that I have been testing and indulging since I was a young teenager. No wave, noise rock, garage punk and post-hardcore music isn't ever gonna be pleasing to the masses of music listeners out there. Thankfully it doesn't need to be, we just need some dudes in England with some microphones and guitars to feel like spending some of their precious hours on this Earth creating a bit of pleasurable chaos. Enter Unqualified Nurse, our British guide into this intensely lo-fi wilderness.
Let Snarl is the full-length I've been waiting for from Unqualified Nurse since they sent in the EP Medicine Music, and let's not forget The Weird. The lo-fi recording technique takes center stage is all of these releases, and it's just as unrelenting in here. The vocals sound like if you were listening to a garage band that had all the doors and windows of said garage closed up while singing into an old mic hanging from a rafter. Very awesome and quite deliberate. The chaos is up front, scaring off those that aren't accustomed to the washed out, fuzzed to the Nth degree style. However, given a good listen the influential nugget of popular garage rock or surf songs from decades ago can be heard nestled deep in there. It's all about the love of what guitar-driven rock and an fine appreciation of the natural degeneration of low-budget audio recording. Unqualified Nurse has done a better just than most in capturing this primordial element of lo-fi rock, like a distilled yet cloudy version of what a garage punk fan knows they love about the genre. You know, lo-fi's je ne sais quoi.
To be had here:
Unqualified Nurse - Let Snarl
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