Marissa Nadler – Strangers
The American pastoral singer artfully combines anomie and melody on her seventh album.
FOR AN ALBUM SO imbued with filmic ebb and flow, it’s invidious to point to particular moments that personify its character. Nonetheless, the balance between chill and warmth running through Marissa Nadler’s seventh album is captured most effectively on Janie In Love with its “natural disaster” of a protagonist and sudden sonic shifts into a vortex where slabs of distorted guitar and strings interweave to disturb the song’s stately pace and yearning melody.
Strangers is about lone reflection and its disruption by unwelcome intrusions. Having left her folk pigeonholing behind on Strangers’ predecessor July, Nadler has moved forward with a delicate yet steel-spined album of intimate soliloquies positing her as having taken up the baton which Mazzy Star have so often dropped.
If David Lynch were looking to soundtrack dreamlike disassociation, he need look no further.
Listen to Janie In Love below: