Mad Nanna press,

One of the first lines uttered on this record is, “Am I hallucinating?” It’s only a minute since you placed the needle in the groove, but it’s already a timely question. I Made Blood Better sounds like a very laaazy submission to some blazed subconscious: it’s basically the aural equivalent of an onset of severe muscle atrophy. Imagine laying in bed for a month. When you first attempt to stand, you immediately fall. But you don’t bother getting back up because … well, it’s quite okay down there, and you had no where to go anyway.

Mad Nanna’s songs aren’t stream-of-consciousness. That’s suggestive of too much baggage, because the only resemblance to sentience here is the fact the music actually moves, albeit with its own syrupy, narcoleptic tread. This record is broken in most conceivable ways. Every note or vocalisation leaves trails of stickiness, like some sickly amphetamine cheese.

Mad Nanna is a Melbourne five-piece, fitting somewhere in the centre of a triad consisting Jandek, the Dead C and the Shadow Ring. If none of those approximate parallels mean anything to you, then just imagine an indie guitar band with a sloppy affectation, slow that down twice-fold, chew the cassette tape, re-spool, and then press play. Most will find this record punishingly listless: Ian Wadley’s drums miss most appointments with “the beat”, while Michael Zulicki’s vocals crudely elucidate only semblances of a theme. Mad Nanna always fall just-so short of making clear what their songs are about, and so the plaintive commonness of the snatches you understand take on some inflated meaning. ‘If I Don’t Sleep Tonight’ is a gorgeous song, if you’ve the patience, but why is he “bleeding on the floor”, and why does he “not mind”? Probably because that’s just what he felt like singing. But amidst the wreckage of sound that accompanies it, you can’t help but fill in the gaps.

Above all else, Mad Nanna sounds resigned. They also sound forlorn, hopeless, broken and inadequate. But it’s not depressing music, and nor does it languish in ennui. It’s liberatingly free: melodies flail and peter out, good ideas occur and disappear because, you know, who cares to rise to them. The whole B-side of this LP is a live performance, and by the sound of things no one in the audience is listening. It’s actually hilarious: you can almost follow entire threads of conversation. But the band play anyway, because what else would they do? They’re a band. This is what a band does. It plays. No matter what. That is the situation.

by Shaun Prescott\mess and noise

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I’m still at a loss as to how to describe what Mad Nanna do. I’ve chalked it up to living-room four-track improv with a mind for melody and a chain linking them way back to the beginnings of the Xpressway underground happening in the southern hemisphere. Mad Nanna play the antithesis to the Aussie punk gnawing at their heels, and instead mellow through an amateurish lens, though we know they know every bent note and misplaced beat is in its proper place. More please. – Agit Reader
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Third month in a row with a new Mad Nanna record to talk about… for a group with seemingly zero interest in playing music, they sure play a lot of music. Seriously, they seem even more suicidal and lonely on I Made Blood Better than before… makes Jandek seem like the charismatic life of the party when Mad Nanna crawl into the opener “Deck Song”. Don’t get me wrong though, Mad Nanna are best when they’re decrepit, tired and irritable, as they certainly are here on this surprisingly lengthy album. And while Jandek only needed his own approval to release his music, somehow Mad Nanna features five band members. It just amazes (and pleases) me that five people would agree to turn out an album this morose and unlistenable, that the entire jury would be in agreement here. I actually had the second side of the album playing while involved in an argument and it made what could’ve been a simple conversation far worse. Few can pull it off like Mad Nanna can, which is why I keep coming back. – Yellow Green Red

Taken from Agit Reader: It takes a special breed to enjoy the work of Jandek. If you can make it through an entire record by the elusive loner, you’re a better man than me. But I suppose difficult music puts hair on your chest and makes the skin thicker—just don’t play it in polite company unless you trying to scatter the dinner party hanger-ons. That challenging barrier between artist and audience seems to pervade the first full-length from Victoria, Australia’s Mad Nanna, I Make Blood Better. In reviewing their debut single, I claimed that the quartet’s “lazy, haze-induced drawl” could only evolve. That’s not quite the case here, as with this record they increase the difficulty of catching hold of how, what and why they make music this anemic, this profoundly untrained. I Make Blood Better first appeared as a tape, but here has been re-recorded, still retaining the lower-than-lo-fi approach of that cassette. As with Jandek and other denizens who sit at farthest end of the abstraction spectrum (think Shaggs or Shadow Ring), you have to blindly dive into their work. These “songs” are brutally personal or part of some clandestine cult of basement dwellers, smoking deep into the night, never paying much attention to the stop and start buttons on the four-track. I would hate to say that it’s all that spiritual, though in their meddling they appear guided by an ethereal force, albeit one half-asleep and half-awake. At times, feedback and distortion float in like a celestial voice. It’s also not the result of accident or idiot glee, though vaporous melodies do form in the rusted, duct-taped swing of “You Can’t Expect It.” Still, you can sense those moments weren’t rehearsed or planned. “My Two Kids” is shambolic Kiwi-pop, only broadcast through headphones in shag carpeting. Why a tune this immediate is sullied by production and an audible lack of enthusiasm again questions the intent of those who dabble in such impenetrable music.

I suppose there’s a method, or a general disregard to methods, that employs this madness. Did these guys intend for us to hear the unabridged, one-note, detuned marathon that is “Deck Song” or the indecipherable, and as a result infinitely creepy, conversation cut directly into the second side? Are we to believe, from the jamboree finale of “Just Before the Sun Hits Down,” that they’d much prefer to give us an album of banjo mutilation and hemisphere blues? Somehow, despite these questions, this alchemy works and works effectively enough to want more, to flip sides, to soak into their ether. The addition of some live recordings, especially the unexpected crowd noise that surfaces in “I Hit A Wall,” erases any loneliness you might afford to a record this intangibly warped. Then again, there’s nothing off-putting or caustic in the sonics that could scare one away. I Make Blood Better is terrestrial in its creature comforts, alien in its composition and somnambulistic in its execution. It’s also entirely a record that depends firmly on the eye of its beholder. To some Mad Nanna’s clumsy psych can morph into dustbin raga, primitive jangle, and even a Pavement song or two (were Pavement really the Sun City Girls). To most, it’s going to sound like a mess, a confused band fumbling in the dark. Mad Nanna speak in tongues, just take the time to learn the language and you will be rewarded.
Kevin J. Elliott

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Listing from Volcanic Tongue: Massively anticipated debut LP from this amazing no-technique downer rock/pop group from Melbourne, Australia who slouch around the basement with alla the primitive elan of The Scrotum Poles/The Shaggs et al: I Made Blood Better is a fully reworked and expanded edition of their original cassette on Goaty Tapes (specifically: five re-worked tracks and three new ones), a staggering navigation of brokedown de-tuned guitar, expiring rhythms and hypnotic downer vocals that should appeal to anyone who ever wept over the first couple of Shadow Ring albums and who thinks the second Godz album was ‘too musical’. Mad Nanna have such a profoundly personal take on the sound of collapsing universes that they rival early Kousokuya and the first Royal Trux album in terms of falling apart to stay together. The battered ‘folk’ edge has a lot in common with the wayward appeal of the early Jandek sides, with the same kind of slowly expiring/barely articulated ‘blues’ guitar runs that define his most ‘out’ sides but with a vocalist that almost out-does The Dead C’s Michael Morley in terms of narcoleptic/beyond the long blank appeal. Stunning songwriting at a wildly distended peak from a group that have virtually re-written the aesthetics of idiot-avant. Profoundly strung out, idiotically moving, highly recommended!

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Mad Nanna If I Don’t Sleep Tonight 7″ (Wormwood Grasshopper)
More Mad Nanna, this time brought to us by the fine folks at Wormwood Grasshopper Records. “If I Don’t Sleep Tonight” might be my favorite Mad Nanna track thus far – the main guy repeats the title and is all thumbs on the guitar while some other band member recreates the sounds my stomach makes when I’m having trouble sleeping at night. Although it’s constantly on the verge of devolving into a Menstruation Sisters-style compost heap, Mad Nanna always hold the song together by one thin hair, capped off by a celebratory whooping of the crowd (looks like this was a live cut). The ostensibly untitled b-side is less to my liking – sounds like the group pared down to an acoustic guitar duo, strumming their basic chords like they just missed the bus and had an unexpected three hours to kill. Had I heard this track first, I may very well have never ventured further into the world of Mad Nanna, so thank God that’s not the case. On the strength of the a-side, and with acknowledgement of the b-side’s subtle charm, this one’s worth keeping too. -Yellow Green Red

“And you’s know who else’s of the same mind? Mad Nanna. They’s function in the Albert’s Basement universe down to Victoria, Australia ‘n the spuzz they’s released on this 7″ is a dandy. Even in a country w/a scene that’s blowin up like the Oz one is, still ain’t no one what sounds like’em. Imagine if that band, Even As We Speak was struck by lightnin & on account, forgot all’s they ever knew. Upon relearnin to play, they’s used a cassette recordin of File Under Pop’s 7″ for inspiration which went beyond therapy ‘n became THE GOAL. It also kinda sounds like a Falling Spikes bootleg what had been caked w/mud & laquered onto vinyl. Definitely Lo-Fi, doubtfully hip. No matter, it’s still a glass what’s half full of life’s lemonade that’s sweeter’n a Soave spritzer. Glug, glug, glug.” -Siltblog

Mad Nanna – I Hit The Wall 7″ – Quemada
With releases coming at a steady clip from these guys, the quality is unflagging, and in fact, I Hit The Wall is something of surprise — breaking from the unsettling bleakness of If I Don’t Sleep Tonight the two cuts here are, well, quite catchy and quite straight. It was always true of Mad Nanna that the songs themselves were excellent — they just happened to be played in such a manner that they barely held together. Here the band are really just being a pop band and it’s great. Not slick or anything, just playing the songs well and clearly. And the songs are good — one is good and the other is great. Highly recommended! $7 -Eggy Records

Mad Nanna “I’ve been talking” 7″- This Melbourne group – whose fluid line-up seems to revolve around one Michael Zukicki – sounds like Jandek singing in a room to himself while Vincent over the Sink fiddles around in the corner. ‘I’ve Been Talking’ was recorded live at the Empress but it sounds like the band was sleeping on the job. ‘I Made Blood Better’ picks up the pace a little, bravely maintaining an average of one-chord per minute. There’s a kinda voyeuristic aura to Mad Nanna – it sounds like the audio diaries of a psych-ward incumbent – but it’s this sense of intimate access to the unstable that makes this debut such a compulsive listen, and given the variety between these two tracks it’ll be fun to see how much more Zukicki’s crew has to offer. Here’s hoping they learn nothing between now and the next record. – Mess and Noise

Mad Nanna – If I Don’t Sleep Tonight 7″ – Wormwood Grasshopper
Very excited to get a handful of this 100 press Australian 7″ from my fav Weirdos of Oz. “If I Don’t Sleep Tonight” finds the ‘Nanna band in a moment of surprising tenderness — late-night sentiments of love and psychosis transmitted via their usual out-of-tune clatter. The unlabeled b-side is mellower still, a very pretty folk-pop number with muted strumming and a guitar line out for a midnight wander, with occasional, distant vocals. An excellent pair of tunes, very skewed and lovely. -Eggy Records

Mad Nanna – I’ve Been Talking 7″ – Little Big Chief
Two Garbage and the Flowers-style stoned strummers from the excellent Mad Nanna, different versions of tracks that are on the Goaty Tape (“I’ve Been Talking” and “I Made Blood Better”). This is actually an American reissue of the 7″, which originally came out on Albert’s Basement and sold out quite briskly. So big ups for Little Big Chief for stepping up and making it available again — the AB edition was actually my introduction to the band, and in the distant future when all of our cassettes are warbley and broken (I didn’t say that) I will be very happy to have this little gem of wax to spin on the turntable. Seriously guys, weird, excellent music on vinyl is the best. It takes balls to release it and you will be comforted to own it. -Eggy Records