‘Strangers’ by Marissa Nadler Review
Marissa Nadler pushes her sound beyond its folk roots on her new album.
On her haunting, occasionally unnerving album, “Strangers” (Sacred Bones), out on Friday, singer-composer Marissa Nadler drenches her tales of love, loneliness and despair in a wash of echoing voices, acoustic guitars and orchestral strings that’s typical of her earlier folk-based recordings. But, working with producer Randall Dunn, she now also includes in her sonic mix lightly applied percussion, eerie organs and a range of electric guitars. By pushing her sound beyond where it’s been before, she’s made the best album of her career.
ENLARGE
In “Janie in Love,” a ballad of deep regret, squalls of guitars and synths rise to surround Ms. Nadler’s dreamy voice. A mournful pedal-steel guitar and electric guitar clear a path for her song of alienation that serves as the album’s title track. Her new environment permits her to include “Nothing Feels the Same” that’s her update of melodramatic, early-to-mid-’60s teenage-tragedy hits, like the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” were it performed by the Velvet Underground.
At the same time, though, Ms. Nadler and Mr. Dunn know when to leave well enough alone. The gorgeous, disquieting ballad “Shadow Show Diane” features little more than Ms. Nadler’s strummed acoustic guitar, with its buzzing low strings, and her overdubbed voice. The album concludes with “Dissolve” in which Ms. Nadler accompanies herself on acoustic guitar. It’s a lovely performance that displays her growing self-confidence as a performer and the integrity of her latest compositions.
Her seventh full-length album, “Strangers” is the zenith of the 35-year-old Boston-based musician’s career, which seems marked by steady progress and is indicative of a mind in motion. While studying for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, she wrote songs and performed in and around Providence, R.I., which led to the release of her 2004 debut, “Ballads of Living and Dying.” It was indisputably a folk album, albeit not a retro-minded one, and featured Ms. Nadler singing and flat-picking amid some atmospherics created by an accordion, keyboards and an electric guitar played with a tone-manipulating device known as an E-bow. Her third disc, “Songs III: Bird on the Water,” earned her acclaim beyond her New England base, and she’s gone on to excel on albums in tribute to Karen Dalton and Judee Sill; to cover compositions by Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson and Neil Young; and to record a vapor-like version of Father John Misty’s “Hollywood Forever Cemetery.” There’s a trove of covers by Ms. Nadler on SoundCloud.
In 2013, Ms. Nadler partnered with Mr. Dunn—who had produced many groups that favor loud, complex and confrontational music—to record “July,” her first album for her current label. On that disc, Ms. Nadler remained in a folk-related milieu, but it was more textured than her prior recordings, more focused and compact. Supported by a seemingly incompatible group of musicians—among them the violinist and jazz experimentalist Eyvind Kang, alt-country pedal-steel guitarist Jason Kardong and drone-metal bassist Jonas Haskins, all of whom have returned for “Strangers”—Ms. Nadler’s performances conveyed a sense of quiet urgency that bordered on desperation.
When we spoke by phone last week, Ms. Nadler said he wrote “Strangers” so it would be performed by an ensemble. She taught herself to use Logic, software that permits musicians to record many instruments and effects to build more complex arrangements. While her fans could guess she grew up savoring the music of Mr. Cohen and Joni Mitchell, she said she also liked grunge and shoegaze, two rock genres that are subtle influences on the new album. She planned the space for the airy, roaring guitar solo that cleaves “Hungry Is the Ghost,” a track that builds with wheedling insistence, and foresaw a tour with a full band. (She will be performing in Western Europe beginning next week before returning in July for a tour of the U.S. and Canada.)
But her writing was impeded by her inability to come up with a suite of songs. “July,” she said, was a “breakup and reconciliation” album. That reconciliation led to marriage, which may have left her without ready access to her preferred themes of isolation and discontent. “I’m not drawn to happy music,” Ms. Nadler said, “and I know there’s a fine line between sentimentality and something worse.”
She fumbled until she began to look outside herself for subject matter. Though she set out to compose what she called “end of the world” songs—the opening track, “Divers of the Dust,” seems set in a post-apocalyptic world—she nevertheless continued to write about love lost and found. In the new setting, though, her latest impressionistic tales took on deeper meaning, resulting in a superior recording by an artist who is exceeding the promise of her previous work.
Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @wsjrock.