The first two installments of Steven Stapleton's collaboration with Graham Bowers left me rather cold. Both Parade and its predecessor Rupture seemed hastily composed, lacking coherence and relying on an irritating overuse of synthesized or otherwise artificial sounding instrumentation. Stapleton's characteristic use of space and tension has over the last few years appeared less and less at the heart of Nurse With Wound's work. Whether this is down to the influence of his collaborators or whether the doyen of audio Dada is just losing his touch is not clear. The result has been to render NWW's output rather indistinct, particularly so considering the never ending conveyor belt of re-issues, alternative versions, live performances and outtake compilations. So perhaps it's with some degree of surprise that I can report that Excitotoxicity is a really good record.