“Fever Dreams”
from the album Dracula
2011
iTunes
Has it really only been two years since the release of Apple’s Acre? Maybe it’s a symptom of our Internet-accelerated age, but it feels like an eternity since we’ve last heard any new music from Nurses. And, oh my, we’ve been hungering for it. The wobbly, sun-kissed sound of this psych-pop band’s first LP was so bracing when it first emerged on the Portland scene, who wouldn’t want another taste?
Our wait is finally come to an end. Nurses’ label Dead Oceans just announced the release of the band’s second LP Dracula. And while we’ll have to wait until September to get our hands and hard drives on the full album, they’ve whetted our appetites with Dracula‘s opening track, “Fever Dreams.”
It’s an appropriate title for this new song. It would make a perfect soundtrack for a night tossing and turning in bed while sweating out some awful bug. Almost all the instruments are lost in a viscous haze, fighting to let their melodies be heard over Aaron Chapman’s vocals and the insistent thunder of James Mitchell’s drumming.
“Fever Dreams” is a song to be pored over under the direction of a pair of good headphones. There’s so much hiding under the layers of reverb and Chapman’s delirious and indecipherable lyrics. Is that a cello skipping along with the band? Are there keyboards hiding in the murk somewhere? Have those handclaps been there the whole time?
Most of all, it has that insular feeling that comes with how the song was created. The boys in Nurses spent a few months cloistered in a cabin on the Oregon coast to record Dracula. Listening to “Fever,” you get a chance to peer into those hive mind days and nights, when Chapman, Mitchell, and John Bowers were sharing jokes and bottles and who knows what else apart from the rest of the world. That they are sharing the fruit of these isolated efforts with us is something to be thankful for. So, let’s not bug them too much about letting us hear the whole album, okay?