Man, look at those guys. Obviously not to be fucked with. That one guy in the middle looks like the leader. He's just sitting there, smoking a cigarette, paying no attention to the fact that the two gentlemen standing to either side of him are about to kick someone's ass. There's a bear head on the wall. The guy with the plaid shirt and the big belt probably wrestled it to the ground with his own two hands, and slowly removed its head with a Swiss Army knife while the guy with his hands over his crotch cheered him on. These are the kind of guys who, if they saw you in a dark alley, would be too busy not giving a fuck about you to kick your ass.
Looking at the cover of World of Gold, it's fun to imagine that the boys of Nerves are true rustic badasses. Unfortunately, only one syllable in the phrase "true rustic badasses" really rings true about this CD. World of Gold is an utterly unspectacular, plodding, and flat-out boring attempt at rough rock swagger. Though there are a few glimpses of inspiringly competent songwriting, this is an album that, at its very, very best, brings to mind phrases like "inspiringly competent."
World of Gold opens with the infuriatingly uneven "10 Feet Tall." Starting with a riff that's about as fresh as Weezer's "Hash Pipe," vocalist Rob Datum pulls out his best semi-retarded Iggy Pop affectations. It's certainly not awful, but it doesn't exactly grab your attention, either. After a while, some well-placed slide guitar hints at greater things, but that hint is never taken, and the song immediately slides back into its stale riffage. And later, another shift towards more interesting songwriting is interrupted by a solo that sounds like it could have been played by a 12-year-old guitar student who's still discovering the wonders of the pentatonic scale.
"Suffering Highway" and "Behind the Trees" are similarly boring-- the former being absolutely unmemorable, and the latter being rather annoying. Sloppy playing is fine, but sloppy slide guitar can lead to an unwanted foray into microtonal music. "Behind the Trees" closes with an absolutely unnecessary instrumental passage complete with vibraphones-- something that may or may not have been specified in their contract when they signed with Thrill Jockey. Tacking on vibraphones to clumsy, endlessly repetitive garage rock does nothing but emphasize the complete lack of original ideas that plagues this album.
I'll give them this much: occasionally, on a track like "Take It," Nerves manage to pull off some sufficiently convincing sloppy rock. Most of the time, though, when World of Gold does manage to grab your attention (which is rare), it isn't in a positive way. Other bands, like Clinic and the White Stripes, have managed to successfully adopt a similar aesthetic by bringing their own innovation and/or energy to the mix. But without the benefit of either of these, World of Gold is about as convincing as pyrite, and ten times as dull.
