Staff Reviews

LoneLady - Nerve Up

Review by Simon Jay Catling

The recent Warp signing is another of example of the label’s increasingly diverse roster: sure, her debut LP does display some of the mechanical flourishes that have previously been associated with the Sheffield imprint - the omnipresent clack and judder of a drum machine underpins almost everything on Nerve Up - for the most though it’s the ghosts of Magazine, Wirem, Factory Records et al. that Campbell recalls. »

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born two miles east of manchester city centre and having lived for 10 years right next to a motorway, the mancunian way, a stone's throw from the arndale centre, canal street, all the shitty, brilliant pubs, clubs, dives, stinking canals, redbrick council estates, leafy suburbs and tarted-up 'quarters', lonelady could walk around manchester blindfolded. she loves / hates it, it is her home, so she had to record there. a fan of first albums, believing them to be a document of struggle, real-ness and wilderness, a lot of lonelady's favourite albums are debuts, and she didn't want to go to london or anywhere else to record 'nerve up'. 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' (co-produced by guy fixsen known for his work with my bloody valentine, the breeders and stereolab) 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 ... (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 30 years, where ghosts stretch from the past and point to the future."
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