Music in Portland + the Pacific Northwest

This Week in Portland Music:

PDX Pop Now! 2015 - Nurses

This weekend I attended my favorite Portland music festival, PDX Pop Now! It amazes me how they are able to put on this amazing event free of charge; their volunteers are truly awesome.

While I was lucky to be able to see some stellar sets, I wanted to do a write up of Saturday night’s final act, Nurses. I had never heard of Nurses until a friend posted “Trying to Reach You” from their album Dracula on Facebook last spring. I was immediately enchanted by Aaron Chapman’s strange vocals and the increasing complexity of the song.

The vast majority of Saturday’s set was new material, and I now have very high expectations for the band’s next release. The new songs featured groovier bass lines and more distorted vocals. Usually, I prefer sets that start strong, dial back the energy, and then end strong. However, Nurses’ set steadily built up energy until about three-quarters of the way through. Chapman performed a song with only a vocoder to heavily distort his voice. While interesting from a technical standpoint, I felt that the energy slowed a little too much at this point and the performance went a little too avant-garde for me. To be fair, though, my boyfriend (Fringe Class’s Brad Russell) was fascinated and thoroughly enjoyed the break in the set. And I do have to give credit to Chapman for his ability to focus–he was interrupted by the train horn and came back in as though nothing had happened.

Nurses ended the set with Dracula’s “Fever Dreams,” a favorite of mine (above). The audience couldn’t help but move, and I even got to witness a couple doing some wild swing dancing. Overall, I’m so grateful to have my first Nurses experience be at PDX Pop Now!. It was a memorable night, and I have a lot to look forward to, both from Nurses and the festival.