Nurses – Dracula

If you find Animal Collective awesome in theory but too obtuse in reality, Nurses offer a safer, less pioneering alternative. They specialise in dub-psych doodles you can whistle along to; swirling exercises in immersive production, but with definite songs at the core. This is both their triumph and their shortcoming; they’re too conventional to astound by dint of experimentation alone, while their prickly sonics thwart gut-level love, resulting in only partial success at each pole.

The band apparently constructed Dracula by “adding one idea on top of another until the sounds became songs”, and perhaps a little subtraction amidst the amassing would have benefited the finished article, with several tracks left to stew in their own liquor. But regardless, there’s much to keep fans happy: the appropriately-titled Fever Dreams sets the tenor with its heady reverb infusion, ensuring Dracula trots a winning furrow in part if not necessarily in whole. [Chris Buckle]