David Nance Group - Peaced and Slightly Pulverized

Omaha, NE musician David Nance is nothing if not prolific. Over the course of the past six years, he has released three full-length albums for labels Grapefruit and Ba Da Bing, a 7-inch, numerous cassettes, CDRs, and unlicensed "cover albums" of artists like Lou Reed, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Doug Sahm. His latest full-length is credited to the "David Nance Group" and features Nance alongside his recent hot-shit live band of fellow Omaha musicians; guitarist Jim Schroeder, bassist Tom May and drummer Kevin Donahue.

Appropriately, the album is called "Peaced and Slightly Pulverized" as the sounds contained therein are alternatingly tender & brusque. Nance has an enviable way of conveying intensity and pathos in his music without necessarily resorting to clicking on a distortion pedal, instead relying on the build-up and tension from the interplay of his bandmates with his cracked, impassioned wail. There's also plenty of fuzz and distortion too, from the anthemic "Poison" with its fuzzed-out guitar riff that leans into a Crazy-Horsian guitar maelstrom and white-hot solo, to "Ham Sandwich"; a blisteringly frantic rant about a lunchtime torment - uncomfortable in its directness. Respite comes with "110 Blues"s languid late-night desert psychedelia, and side one closes with the epic seven-and-a-half minute "Amethyst", expanded & jammed upon from 2017's Richie Records single into an emotional odyssey with Nance & Schroeder strangling their guitars into a twin-guitar, barbed-wire duel. The album's centerpiece is "In Her Kingdom", an emotive ballad that fades into view with a plaintive guitar strum, and over seven minutes ebbs and flows with a rising tide of swelling guitars, its riffs gilding the melody & adding flecks of gold to Nance's tale of poverty and grace. Alternately, "When I Saw You Last Night" stalks the night like a predator, finally finding its prey two and a half minutes in with a stinging, blood-drenched guitar solo. The album closes with "Prophet's Profit"'s biting commentary on false idolatry that again utilizes the group's not-so-secret weaponry of Nance and Schroeder's six-string simpatico to bring the listener home.