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Nurse & Soldier, "Marginalia"
The second album from Oneida's Bobby Matador and Erica Fletcher percolates the brain with its rich variety of effects and treatments. The songs themselves are pared down pop nuggets without a whole lot of structural variation. Even though there aren't a lot of different styles on display here, the palette of sounds used on this recording often surpasses that limitation.
The first couple of songs on Marginalia are especially strong, even tantalizing with promises of a bright future. “Green Tea” is brewed with subtle strengths that perk the ears even as it soothes. Under a cascading piano loop hides all kinds of strange distortions, shimmering organs, and low-end oscillations. Because the loop is constant, the song doesn’t change much melodically but there’s so much going on texturally that it hardly matters. There are warbling vocals on this track, but they’re less of a focus here than on other parts of the album. “Capture the Flag” ups the ante by picking up the tempo, adding a beat, and placing distortion more prominently in the mix. Here, too, is perhaps the strongest vocal performance on the album from Fletcher as she harmonizes with herself to capture the essence of emotional longing.
Yet as the vocals become more and more the focus of the songs that follow, they become one of the album’s weaknesses. It’s not that Fletcher’s voice is bad, and there are certainly many good moments to be found, but she exhibits a limited range and such a similar delivery on many of the songs that her voice becomes monotonous after a while. That some of the lyrics rely too heavily on pat rhymes doesn’t help, either. The vocals aren’t the only thing to cause my initial enthusiasm to wane. There are a couple of tracks that are pretty derivative. “In the Dark” could easily be a cutting room floor casualty from the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, and the booming beat on “Back in Yr Corner” sounds suspiciously like their pals the Liars. Even more disappointing is that the production loses steam after a while, sounding somewhat rote toward the end as if the band’s not quite so inspired as they were at the beginning.
While the album never recaptures its initial high, that first excited buzz still stayed with me long after the album was over.
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