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Critic's Review
Rolf Semprebon, All Music Guide
A lot of longtime fans were dismayed by the direction Nurse With Wound went with Rock 'n' Roll Station's clunky electronica rhythms. Then again, N.W.W. was meant to confound its fans, even more so with this Rock 'n' Roll Station Special Edition. Second Pirate Session offers the complete recordings from those sessions, reissuing Rock 'n' Roll Station with a bonus track and another entire CD of music, thus making the original Rock 'n' Roll Station CD obsolete. The additional material is actually quite good, with many of the pieces less robotic and minimal than the Rock 'n' Roll Station tracks. Though there are none of the strange female vocals from Rock 'n' Roll Station, the new material instead offers some wild sax workouts and even some Krautrock-styled guitar. Even a weaker track like the fairly close rendering of a Frank Zappa piece, here titled "Subterranean Zappa Blues," distinguishes itself with some weird sax skronk at the end. Though nothing here gets as chilling as Rock 'n' Roll Station's "Finsbury Park," which re-creates the last moments in the head of blues guitarist Graham Bond before he threw himself in front of a train, pieces like "Chuggin'" and "Ernest Needs a Kidney" manage to create an uneasy dissidence between the beats and the strange sounds. A lot of the extra material is just as good as the stuff that made it on the Rock 'n' Roll Station CD. Like that disc, Second Pirate Session isn't quite as strikingly weird as the best N.W.W., but there are certainly some good moments.
