Tunes Review: Nice Nice – Extra Wow

By Matthew Ritchie, Staff Contributor

It’s pretty obvious for most music fans that David Bowie is a god, but that doesn’t stop him from making shitty songs. Take for instance his 1971 song “Aladdin Sane,” on the album of the same name. The song is quite good…for about two minutes. After that, it spirals off into a drugged out clonking of discordant piano notes that make little sense. Less visionary statement, more “There goes Bowie, bumping into things again.”

Now, what if you had an album that’s first song sounded much like that, but for five minutes long. Pretty annoying, right?

That’s what you get with Nice Nice and their album Extra Wow, an album that, contradictory to its title, doesn’t leave you very surprised.

The opener “Set and Setting” begins with a chorus of what sounds like the exact opening synthesizer in Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” The song progresses into drum mayhem in the same vein of noise rockers Lightning Bolt.

It all sounds a lot like Liars. In fact, it’s pretty clear these guys really, really like Liars.

The next five songs on the album seem more like sketches than any real finished soundscape.

However, if you were to pick up this album in vinyl format, you would almost certainly never play Side A and focus solely on Side B, because the last few songs are real gems.

“Big Bounce” is a song that may be mimicking African tribal rhythms and gang vocals (which every shitty band are doing at the moment), but actually pulls it off surprisingly well. It sounds more Peter Gabriel and Tinariwen than Local Natives, and that’s a good thing.

“See Waves” allows the listener to poke their head into Nice Nice’s record collection a bit further, because this track has Neu! written all over it. It may be a rip off of “Hallogallo”, but at least it’s a good one.

Than we have “A Vibration”, a track that gets all of the Can out of these prog rocker’s system.

The album finishes with a number  of spacey and atmospheric tracks that don’t seem to mean much on first listen. The strong bulk of the album lies in the middle. This should have been an EP.