- Label: 'Bella Union Records'
- Genre: 'Folk'
- Release Date: '20th May 2016'
Our Rating:
"I told you when I came I was a stranger" - Leonard Cohen.
On her previous record , July, Marissa Nadler was holed up at a Holiday Inn and in a bad way after a messy break up. It's good to report that she is in a better place now although this doesn't mean she's about to morph into a shiny pop diva expounding the power of love.
Now, as ever, Nadler sings songs of quiet desperation since, as the publicity of this record helpfully explains, her muses are "primal, fractured, disillusioned, delicate and alone".
Her debut album in 2004 was accurately entitled Ballads of Living and Dying and placed a stronger emphasis on those on the wrong side of the grave.
One decade on, her preoccupation with death is less pronounced but her yearning, forlorn voice is such that all her songs are inevitably tinged with sadness and melancholy.
There is always a gothic dimension to her work making her a kind of Emily Strange of folk. Having worked with bands like Sunn O))) and Earth producer Randall Dunn is a perfect match because he knows all about creating dark dense textures to match Nadler's morbid tendencies.
The masterstroke on this record is to employ a hard ass group of Seattle musicians who occasionally provide the kind of heavy drone backing that one associates with the uber-cool soundtracks to the movies of Jim Jarmusch. Indeed, the drama in the title track is such that it wouldn't be out of place in the soundtrack to a metaphysical western.
It all comes together on Hungry Is The Ghost, a magnificently sustained piece which lasts 6 minutes but you sense could easily have kept the same level of intensity for twice this duration.
The opening track, Divers Of The Dust written using William Burroughs style cut-ups, produces lines like "The waves were scraping city streets" and here ,as in the album as a whole, the dichotomy between dreams and reality is both explicitly and implicitly addressed.
This duality informs another of the standout tracks, All The Colours Of The Dark, and can also be traced in Waking, inspired by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz ("I fell asleep and nothing had changed").
The conclusion comes with Dissolve, a beautifully stripped back tune, which reveals that although Nadler may reach out towards the wider world, she remains content to be an insular, even solitary, figure.
She confesses "I don't care about anybody, except a few around" yet, paradoxically, this closing track is the most tender of love songs in which the repetition of the line "You never bring me down" is a reminder that even fiercely independent spirits need someone they can believe in.
By straddling the void that lies between isolation and dependency, these songs of experience combine delicacy with strength to make it Marissa Nadler's finest album to date.
