I've become the lucky recipient of the much maligned (by my colleagues!) Lonelady album. 'Nerve Up' seems to be a collection of sparse new-wavy pop songs with a very mild isolationist 80s touch. Given her cooler-than-thou list of post-punk influences, the production on this album sounds far too clean & sterile. Some tracks like the single 'Intuition' come across like early 90s college femme-rock such as Tsunami or Crowsdell but with a rather limp drum machine. There's definitely a bit of defiant charm to these tunes however, I catch some spartan electro funk flavours to the title track but there's also the spectre of Alanis Morrisette hovering around the periphery of your conscience to contend with. 'Early The Haste Comes' reminds me a lot in spirit of the second Pylon album 'Chomp', frisky, hollowed guitar, breathless vocal & a plodding drum machine put-putting away. Listen carefully though, there's some really appealing flourishes to these tracks. She's obviously got a distinctive vision, i'd really like to hear this album again, but with the sound crawling forlornly through the fuzzy lo-fi murk of a broken cassette recording because there's definitely summat interesting there, lurking under the frustratingly bland sheen. Confused? Yes we are......
Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.
Sound clips for Nerve Up by Lonelady: on vinyl at Norman Records UK. LP (vinyl), Warp, WARPLP186, £13.19.
• LoneLady AKA Julie Campbell is a self-styled writer, vocalist and tight guitarist.
• With little more than thorny determination and a shoestring budget, she built a secluded ramshackle studio in the belly of one of Manchester’s crumbling mills and created ‘Nerve Up’ in the span of four weeks.
• The aesthetics of this ex-mill were a pure joy for LoneLady and invoked the ghosts of bands she loves like (Joy Division, ESG, Wire, Grace Jones, The Fall, Suicide, PiL), grainy black and white images depicting the kind of spaces that have barely changed over the past thirty years, where ghosts stretch from the past and point to the future.
• Co-produced by Julie and Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, The Breeders, Stereolab), LoneLady has delivered far more than just an assembly of songs in album form, but the outcome of a process of making something out of nothing, witness to the gargantuan task of forging a homemade recording studio in a crumbling corner of a dilapidated mill, as though it were hewn from the tattered remnants of some unnamed apocalypse.
