For her fifth album, Marissa Nadler has started to let the light into her music. The reverb pedal has been left aside and her words have been put into stark relief by new instrumentation that gives her music a more country feel. This change in style has not diluted her vision; the move feels natural and sounds like it was meant to happen at some point in her career.
On her first few albums, Nadler created stunning American gothic works that were as indebted to literary touchstones like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson as they were to North American songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. Her music had the same features of old silver halide photographs; the limited tonal range of her guitar and voice like the blacks and greys of the image and the reverb combined with her lyrics analogous to the blurs and grain of the final photographs.
Here, she retains her unique character but continues along the trajectory change she started with Little Hells to form bigger, more intricate arrangements for her songs. This is the leap from glass plates to full color film. It is this move that makes me think back to my reference to Leonard Cohen, particularly how he went from being a talented folk singer to an unmistakable force of nature. Based on the evidence here, the same might be said of Nadler. There is a vibrancy to these new songs which sound like a new world compared to her early albums.
Such a sea change could spell disaster for such an artist with such a strong aesthetic but Nadler is confident and talented enough to make it work. The pedal steel guitar and piano on "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" brings the heat of a Nashville summer into the music. The bittersweet lyrics place Nadler closer to the likes of Josh Pearson than to the likes of Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart where she is usually classed. This is true of the rest of the album as Nadler takes on a more mature, classic songwriting style without sacrificing any of her bite. Elsewhere, a whining synthesizer on "Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning" pushes the music again away from any sort of "safe" country that these arrangements might stray towards.
Lyrically, Nadler has not strayed too far from what I have come to expect from her, which is a good thing indeed. Mixing folklore with myth, myth with romance and romance with existential woe, there is a lot going on even within one song. Lines like "With my phantom limbs and eerie hymns/There are two of us here that I know" show that her turn of phrase still revolves around the dusty romanticism of the kind of Americana that exists only in poetry, music and film.
While I think her Songs III: Bird on the Water remains her definitive album, Nadler is setting on a path which will result in some exceptionally rewarding music. This album is great but the potential to be even greater is not only there but blooming. In later years, Little Hells and Marissa Nadler will probably be viewed as a transitional period for Nadler but in the present, this is another exceptional album that begs attention
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