A collection of new songs written by Nina Nastasia and Jim White from 'The Dirty Three'. Nina's rare gift of a voice produces hook laden songs about love,longing and loss, whilst Jim Whites songwritting who has been made famous recently by working with the likes of Will Oldham,Nick Cave and Snog that produces a rare songwritter talent creating a deul and duet between artists.
Nina Nastasia & Jim White
You Follow Me
[Fat Cat; 2007]
Rating: 8.6
Nina Nastasia has a knack for singing about talking. Of the 10 excellent songs on You Follow Me, eight of them cite, narrate, or allude to conversation. It's fitting, then, that her latest album-- a deeply communicative collaboration with virtuoso drummer Jim White-- is among the most solid and striking things she's ever released. White's nuanced drumming makes a perfect foil for Nastasia's sturdy voice, and the interaction between the two is entrancing.
White and Nastasia wrote and arranged You Follow Me together, and the depth and caliber of their collaboration is immediately apparent. Every chord, note, and drum hit seems perfectly arranged for maximum impact; a well-placed kick or snare drum often feels like a punch in the chest. White masterfully teeters between order and chaos, pushing Nastasia into previously unexplored expressive territory. And though the album is arranged solely for vocal, guitar, and drums, it never feels stale or samey. If anything, the record's economy makes it all the more arresting.
Steve Albini's stark and sinewy production further highlights the album's dynamic range. From the skittering shuffle of "Our Discussion" to the authoritative boom of "Late Night", nothing on You Follow Me is half-baked or half-assed. "The Day I Would Bury You" brings to mind Will Oldham's "Nomadic Reverie", gradually building in intensity before dying down to a haunting murmur. By the song's end Nastasia is barely audible, perfectly expressing the song's confusion and devastation.
As with the music, Nastasia's lyrics here never seem haphazard or tossed off. Over the course of the record, dry observations and lyrical metaphors are deployed strategically and purposefully, evoking the sober ease of the early evening and the vivid horror of the late night. The feverish naturalistic imagery of "I've Been Out Walking" seems just as comfortable and well-placed as the more pensive narration of "Our Discussion". On album closer "I Come After You", White's decisive and muscular drumming weaponizes Nastasia's lyrical indictments ("Don't think you are exceptional / Don't dream you're better than anyone else").
Clocking in at just over a half-hour, You Follow Me avoids the aimless indulgence that musicians communicating at this level often succumb to; it's clear that Nastasia and White made pains to ensure that every second of You Follow Me is indispensable. And, sure enough, not a single sound on this record falls outside of the album's unending and all-encompassing dialog. These songs are built like a Jenga game; it's hard to imagine subtracting a single piece without the whole thing falling apart. At a time when piling on wacky instruments often passes an excuse for lackluster songwriting, You Follow Me is incredibly refreshing. Like the best conversation partners it doesn't talk a lot, but it says a lot.
-Matt LeMay, August 14, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/ninanastasia
Review by Thom Jurek
What do you get when you add Dirty Three/Tren Brothers drummer Jim White to a Nina Nastasia record? It all depends on what you are expecting to hear, of course. White was part of the spiny little band that accompanied Nastasia on her initial Fat Cat offering On Leaving in 2006. While that record was skeletal, this one is positively minimal, yet in some ways it is also bigger. With only White's syncopated, iconoclastic beatmaking as a foil, Nastasia is challenged to get her songs across with her guitar playing carrying more of the weight. White is not an accompanist here, he is a collaborator, even though he didn't write the songs. In just 31 minutes the pair look into the strange shapes and images that are at the root of her mostly hummable songs and stretch them to the breaking point. Steve Albini recorded the set at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and his trademark is on White's drum sound, full of bassy tom toms and wispy brushwork, even as his bass drum and his rim shots color the end of each line Nastasia sings, and creates breaks in the heart of lyrics to underscore a line or two, offering a portal to the meaning of her sometimes elliptical lyrics, or providing a tunnel into the emotion in a song. Topically, You Follow Me has reflections on family, broken commitments, memory -- bitter and bittersweet -- and death. These are bright and shiny subjects to be sure, but Nastasia's voice emits tenderness no matter what she is singing, creating a sense of equanimity in all of it. Her notions of regret, reverence, anger and fear are all offered matter of factly, yet there is no doubt of her devotion to the truth a song dictates. White gets that vocal instrument, and he does his best to point toward it in every song.
Standout tracks include the resigned yet potent and relatively up-tempo "The Day I Would Bury You," a portrayal of marriage gone bad with only the wife's resignation of an end where poisoned emotions are useless tools because the war is over. On the other side of this song, though, is the sweet if gray-shaded "How Will You Love Me?" one of the slowest waltzes ever played (and White is deceptive in that he inverts the beat, playing around the accents of the time signature). The protagonist asks questions about being loved, about loving, about the future, death, and the opportunity for resurrection. The sheer helplessness and anger in "Late Night," as the protagonist plays witness to another's self destruction is almost unbearable, as her words accent that helplessness and the rage it provokes. White's drums don't follow her words; his beats nearly predicate them. He contains emotion and brings it up, out, and over the edge. You Follow Me is worlds away from Dogs, from Run to Ruin, but picks up where On Leaving left off. These songs are sung either in retrospect or at the line of disintegration, their sharp, even fiery words held in check only by Nastasia's innate sense of musicality and melodic complexity. White can offer her edges of his own because his sense of time stretches to the past as well as pointing to conclusions that are open-ended in the future. He floats, digs, sputters, halts, and pushes through the music, just as the woman who is playing guitar and singing does. All of this feels effortless, but it is not: all of this coheres in order to convey these small but mercurial and sophisticated songs.
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