- Sea Armchair
- Migration to the Head
- Earthwork
- Red Period
- This Lady for Burning
- Chasing the Carrot
- Sugarland
- There's Always Another Illusion
- Stewing the Red Herring
- Mourning Smile
- Pulse Interplay
- A View from Lammas Tower
- Swallowhead
- Fitching a Wrong Sucker
- All That's Left-Over
- Forever Chasing the Carrot
- The Terminal Song
- Ship of the Dead
- Obituary Obligation
- Nihil
Considered to be one of the best early Nurse albums, classy, stylish and often beautiful Spiral insania is a patchwork quilt of dreamy, noisy, and evocative music. Beginning with one of the albums highlights the wonderfully restrained Sea armchair, simple tonal ambience over which Stapleton weaves his classic scratchy metallic noises and odd percussive elements in a rhythmic fashion. The track listing lists 20 tracks, but on record they are moulded together into three long progressive pieces. After the mellow inviting start the atmosphere is broken by pulsing mechanical sounds, possibly some horribly distorted guitar loop, interspersed with loud organ notes, and other surreal misplaced sonic objects. That pulsing mechanical sound make several appearances throughout the album and serves to break up the different textures and collages of sounds.
The second piece begins with more organ and mechanics before a period of light heartedness using some jolly piano playing and cartoonish sound effects, always mindful of the contrast the light hearted mood is broken up by eerie voices and a deeper more monotonous piano playing. This track is filled with strange percussive instruments, distant voices and radio recordings.
The third and final track is a quiet mix between field samples and distant electronic and percussive elements. It’s almost as if they sat in a quiet field and slowly played away their time. Very atmospheric, animals, machines, and people drift sedately across your ears. Brief appearances of the looped guitar add some welcome break to the ambience. After about eleven minutes what sounds like a short circuit in a crazed android smashes up the atmosphere and we are left I a droning sounds cape of distant voices and reverbed effects, before it all fades out leaving you breathless. Without doubt one of the bands finest moments and a great example of how the sound of the band has progressed over the seven years since the debut was recorded.
