A Woman's Weapon/Wet Nurse

"The Thing That Wasn't There/The Wooden Song" EP
self-released

So right before Xmas I was skulking around the Movement HQ, shaking down the couch cushions for loose change so that I could buy "Golden Compass" action figures and liquid eyeliner to drink, and I came upon this unassumimg CD-R buried under an already groaning pile, with no accompanying info beyond a hasty marker scrawl. Taking a closer peek, I see that it's a 4-song CDR split release between A Woman's Weapon and the Wet Nurse! Fucking score! They're only the two best bands in Jacksonville bar none - perfect for washing the taste of the Black Kids out of your ears, argh - both, not at all coincidentally, fronted by ace vocalist Danielle Mathieux. A Woman's Weapon is her cabaret-noir project with electro enfante-terible Jason Irvin, and the Wet Nurse is her noise-horror solo project. The Woman's Weapon "side" starts out with "The Thing That Wasn't There" and here I thought I'd heard all their songs up to this point! Not a chance loser - and it's a monstrous ditty too. A slice of gothic horror much more haunted house creepy than pretty much anything else I've encountered by them - comes off like a cross between Beat Happening at their Crampsiest, Legendary Pink Dots at their most twilit and Pil at their most nauseous. Disorienting doesn't even begin to describe it - primitive slabs of seesawing electronics crisscross like a storm-tossed boat while Mathieux and Ervin sing-talk through their lines like two late-night horror hosts. After that is one of their other high points, the melancholy and baroque "Mother's Lament," which is just... goddamn, sparse chord organ lurks quietly beneath her trilling voice. After that are two tracks from the Wet Nurse album that I previously reviewed, the "Wooden Song" and a tense cover of Queen Adreena's "Kissing My Disgrace.". Check out that for more context - but let me tell you that it's always good to revisit that. I don't know how you're going to get ahold of this album. Maybe write'em real nice and tell'em that some crank was raving about their tunes.

To my knowledge Wet Nurse have never played out, and Woman's Weapon only gigs sporadically. Time to hit the fucking road. I hate seeing genuinely good music moulder unnoticed. Enough of the hiatus nonsense, okay guys?

- Matthew Moyer