NITKOWSKI - Stay in the Home You Love (Album Review)
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Written by Ben Bland
Out of all the UK’s fine purveyors of noise dominated rock, Nitkowski are possibly the easiest to love on the face of things. Live at least this is a band that, despite the fact that they love to experiment and bemuse their listeners, packs a pretty direct punch and so are all the better as a result. “Stay in the Home You Love” is the band’s second full-length album and the trio (two guitarists and a drummer) seem determined not to make it as fun as a standard live set.
This album is a difficult one. There are times when every band, no matter how different or experimental their tendencies may be, should make some sort of gesture to their audience. A sign that their perseverance and attention is recognised and appreciated, whether such a sign is portrayed through a burst of glorious feedback or through a chorus that stays in your brain for months at a time. The problem with this record is that it never really engages the listener as it should. For some undefinable reason this album is unexpectedly hard to connect to. Even the strongest moments like “Strike the Last Flare” and “Shut Up and Swallow” are curiously hard to enjoy. In their usual live guise of playing mostly on the floor of the venue, Nitkowski are hard not to enjoy.
It may be the occasionally overly scratchy sound of the recordings but whereas bass never sounds like it is missing from the band when they play live, on this album there seems to be the occasional hole where one could really savour a meaty bass line. The defiant, all-encompassing noise of a Nitkowski live show here is rendered disappointingly thin. Compositionally however this album is still an extremely valiant attempt, and should please fans of mathy noise rock enormously.
With its ever unique take on what it means to be a grungy underground band (not as in grunge the genre, don’t get excited Kurt fans), this album has plenty of ideas and expresses them quite well most of the time. The vocals are pretty much perfectly suited to the instrumentation, and the members of this band clearly all have their talents. Compositionally this is actually rather impressive for the most part. Despite all this though it is still bafflingly hard to love. As such it is difficult to come away from this album wanting to give it another spin.
“Stay in the Home You Love” is out now via Function Records.
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This album is a difficult one. There are times when every band, no matter how different or experimental their tendencies may be, should make some sort of gesture to their audience. A sign that their perseverance and attention is recognised and appreciated, whether such a sign is portrayed through a burst of glorious feedback or through a chorus that stays in your brain for months at a time. The problem with this record is that it never really engages the listener as it should. For some undefinable reason this album is unexpectedly hard to connect to. Even the strongest moments like “Strike the Last Flare” and “Shut Up and Swallow” are curiously hard to enjoy. In their usual live guise of playing mostly on the floor of the venue, Nitkowski are hard not to enjoy.
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