Songs III is one of the most engaging singer-songwriter releases this year Pitchfork (8.1) The most exquisite thing happening right now **** Mojo The most enchanting record from the folk underground since Joanna Newsom s Ys **** Uncut Haunting folk; the first heartbreaker of 2007 The Sunday Times Wistful new-folk so perfectly in thrall to its influences that it could pass as a lost treasure from the early 60 s Q MagazineSongs III: Bird on the Water is a dark and atmospheric record, and Nadler s most personal to date. Thematically she relates to characters living on the fringes of society. The songs revolve around the demise of a love relationship as well as eulogies and dirges. For the uninitiated, Marissa Nadler grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, where perhaps the brutal winters bred into her a chilly disposition and an early propensity for the darker and more melancholy side of things. Marissa s first LPs were of home recordings. Ballads of Living and Dying was a release that Pitchfork called a landscape you may want to get lost in for a century or two." A second album of home recordings, The Saga of Mayflower May has garnered the same acclaim with Pitchfork calling it simply an "enthralling album". It was inevitable that Marissa would rise from the underground to reach a wider audience. Her music is dreamy and spectral: an amalgam of traditional folk, paisley underground, shoegaze, and dream pop. Almost all of the songs are very sad about broken hearts, death, or simple burdens. Her voice is what most people immediately respond to, with the writing and playing yielding a slow burn subtlety. Excelling at a Fahey-esque finger-picking technique, she plays homage to some of the great early American blues players. Songs III is certainly her most cohesive album to date and exquisite, essential listening for fans of the 4AD canon, Joanna Newsom, and Jolie Holland - for starters.
Marissa Nadler
Songs III: Bird on the Water
[Peacefrog ; 2007]
Rating: 8.1
At first, Marissa Nadler's Songs III: Bird on the Water doesn't seem especially notable. It's a 12-track breakup album detailing Nadler's pervasive loneliness, her gentle finger-style guitar augmented with cello, percussion, mandolin, synthesizers, and electric guitars. Her voice is remarkable from the outset-- a sad, husky air that climbs to perfect grace notes with ease-- but by the time Nadler sings, "Oh my lonely diamond heart/ It misses you so well," 100 seconds into opener "Diamond Heart", you're pretty sure you've heard this one before.
Not so fast: As Nadler and her gorgeous, incredibly isolated Songs III would have it, there's plenty worth waiting for. Nadler doesn't want empathy for the hurt that caused her to write "Diamond Heart" in a hotel room bathtub in New Jersey or "Bird on Your Grave" for a friend who died mysteriously; she's just trying to ease some of that monumental pain into the next space. And-- though its micro-payoffs may come in the form of a solitary harmony here, a hushed mandolin chord there, or the eerie bells lending a richer atmosphere to the beautiful "Dying Breed"-- such a feeling makes Songs III one of the most focused and engaging singer-songwriter releases so far this year.
Of course, that can be a tough sell for folks accustomed to concentrated emotional whomp. Aside from its presiding atmosphere of pain, little about Songs III feels direct. It peels free in slow, steady layers, Nadler's sorrow ensconced in impressionistic phrases and careful musicianship. As a songwriter, she's still painting relationship trauma in grayscale sadness, occasionally calling on stunning images-- "eyes as deep as brandy wine," "red-painted lips and a jezebel crown," "breaking on the daylight"-- to better realize sullen torment. But that latter layer makes Songs III much more effective than Nadler's 2005 debut, The Saga of Mayflower May.
Nadler's a bandleader now: With acoustic wonderment still in place, she brings most of Philadelphia's Espers to bear here. They augment without distracting, building on her gravitas with quietly breathtaking nuance: A cymbal-scrape pallor from Otto Hauser, or Jesse Sparhawk's weeping mandolin; like Helena Espvall's doubled cello parts smeared over Nadler's "rose-colored dreams" on "Thinking of You", these sounds highlight the words. Even the album's loudest moment, Greg Weeks' piercing electric lead on "Bird on Your Grave", won't wow you from afar, but it will pull you close enough to identify with Nadler's pain.
As a vocalist, Nadler stretches this environment towards infinity: By doubling and tripling her vocals and lacing several distinct interpretations of one melody, she implies that her despair is now as it was then as it always will be. During a splendid, organ-and-guitar take on Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", for instance, the narrator's desolation comes doubled in verses, tripled in the chorus, and chased consistently by the organ. Doom follows her like a rain cloud, it seems, soaking her feelings but powering this, her best set of songs yet. Sure, that's a mundane thing to say about an artist, but on Songs III, it's notable after all.
-Grayson Currin, March 07, 2007
Review by Thom Jurek
Songwriter Marissa Nadler's first two albums of home recordings, 2004's Ballads of Living and Dying and 2006's Saga of Mayflower May, were both issued by Eclipse and got plenty of traction from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Homemade, sparsely produced, with mysterious, engaging covers, she took the critics' and punter's ears by storm, though in her homeland of America, she remained almost unheard of. Her extensive European touring attracted the notice of the U.K.'s fine Peacefrog imprint that issued Song III: Bird on the Water earlier in 2007. The album has been licensed by the Kemado label in the U.S. and is being given the proper release treatment it deserves. Nadler, who is continually associated with the freak folk underground, is actually far from it. She may be a fiercely independent artist, and her songs may be rooted in times past -- from 18th and 19th century Celtic root sources to the psychedelic folk scene -- before it got polished up in Laurel Canyon in the late '60s, yet Nadler is a very sophisticated songwriter. Her lyrics never complicate her songs, even when drenched in symbolism and obscure references that are never labored. She is also a fine guitar player who possesses a strange and wonderfully pleasant singing voice. Her earlier recordings have emerged from their humble homemade origins to gain a small but faithful audience because they're solid, and full of dark and lithe songs about people, places and situations past and present -- even if the past is distant history. The small, even skeletal production values on her previous discs only served to underscore the strength in the material itself.
On Song III, Nadler ups the ante. These songs may have been written in her bedsit, but they are executed on this disc with the kind tiny grandeur they deserve. In some ways, listening to Nadler is akin to listening to Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine (she covered a track of theirs on a compilation disc a while back). There is a directness to her delivery and she never flinches from her material, yet she sounds out of this time and space at the same moment. Recorded by Greg Weeks in Philadelphia, Nadler surrounds herself with a small group of very attentive and sympathetic musicians. Weeks plays synth and distorted lead guitar parts; Helena Espvall sits at the cello; Orion Rigel Dommisse appears on mandolin and harp; and Otto Hauser lends a hand on percussion. At the center of every song is Nadler's guitar playing: fingerpicked, rhythmic, and full of a kind of forward movement that sometimes stands at delightful odds with the timelessness of her lyrics and singing voice.
On this 11-song set, ten are originals, and the lone cover is daunting: Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," which adds new meaning to the songwriter's words and even Jennifer Warnes' excellent interpretation. The standout tracks -- though all are excellent, deeply moving and emotionally taut -- are "Feathers," "Diamond Heart," "Silvia," and "Mexican Summer." They talk of loss, death, grief, the brokenness in love, transgression, and the appearance of being able to move freely among these very strong emotions while becoming so informed by them: her world view and her heart's view are not only informed by them, but inseparable from them. Nadler has written a song suite here that fully articulates her strongest gifts: she never has to reach for notes, only to open her mouth and they pour like honey, slowly, purposefully, and look at the smaller entrances where her imaginative narratives enter the human being and root themselves there for lifetimes. There are no seams in this album, and to quote her lyric poetry out of the context from the music would be an injustice.
Song III is not to be compared with any of the recordings of her contemporaries. She falls for none of the traps, she communicates with a kind of gentle candor that is unsettling, elegant, and utterly graceful. This is music that is violent in its ability to shift the listener's attention toward it, but it is delivered gently, slowly, and purposefully. For those who have been seduced by the works of Buffy Sainte-Marie's Illuminations album, Tom Rapp's later solo work, the recordings of Bill Fay, late Current 93, Antony, Michael Cashmore, Leonard Cohen's early material, or the middle period records of Pearls Before Swine, this is certainly for you. For anyone looking for early Joni Mitchell or Joanna Newsom, search elsewhere. Disturbing, beautiful and unforgettable, Song III: Bird on the Water is among the most arresting recordings of 2007 thus far and sets a new high-water mark for this seemingly limitless songwriter.
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