Marissa Nadler - Along the Path of the Clouds

Among the new damsels of post-2000s folk, Marissa Nadler stands out for at least three qualities. First, the voice: a crystalline mezzo-soprano, yet one capable of slipping perfectly into her darkest musical weaves. Then, a "classical" attitude, which gives her a greater sense of restraint compared to the muddled "avant" ambitions of other exponents of the genre. Finally, a peculiar talent, almost Cohen-esque in nature, for sketching gorgeous melodic openings within bare-bones soundscapes. The Washington-born singer-songwriter has thus managed to set herself apart from the throng of girls with guitars that continues to flood the independent market to this day. Credit goes to a formidable run of albums that we can already safely count among the finest female singer-songwriter output of these two post-2000s decades.

Perpetually on the move — from New York to Boston, all the way to her current home in Nashville — Marissa Nadler lives in her own time, yet with an old soul, as if she were the reincarnation of a Romantic heroine from the 1800s or some siren from the mystical Sixties (Nico?). A lovely oval face framed by long black hair, pale skin and delicate movements: she wanders through the frozen woods of her songs like a restless ghost. Wintry songs, indeed, that bring to mind Leonard Cohen's "Songs Of Love And Hate" or Nick Cave's "Murder Ballads" for their exploration of the darkest, most desolate recesses of the human soul. But, looking closer, the heart of her music must be traced back even further in time: to the tradition of Appalachian storytellers, to Celtic and Provençal folk, to the ancient Portuguese school of fado (the comparison with Teresa Salgueiro of Madredeus is not so far-fetched), and to an eternal psychedelia that swings from the roaring Sixties to the dreamy languor of Hope Sandoval.

Pressed in just 550 copies by Empire Records, a small Arizona label, the debut album Ballads Of Living And Dying (2004) is a collection of "songs of love and death" penned by Nadler herself, save for two literary tributes — to Edgar Allan Poe (the tale of doomed love "Annabelle Lee") and Pablo Neruda (a fado-tinged reworking of "Hay Tantos Muertos", with an evocative organ accompaniment).

The ballad format reclaims its original meaning here: no longer a simple "slow number" or some run-of-the-mill sentimental tune, but a small dramatic poem, set to music in the manner of old-time storytellers, with circular structures, catchy rhymes and bare-bones arrangements as backdrop. Marissa Nadler's voice floats ethereal, punctuated only by her fingerpicking (guitars, banjo and ukulele) and the shadowy rustle of strings.

The opening "55 Falls" opens the gates to this arcane village over the chilling notes of a slide guitar, "Mayflower May" leads down a desolate country path, thronged with ghosts and unsettling silences, "Days Of Rum" strikes up an old-fashioned country-blues, plucked on banjo strings, while "Virginia" is a funereal portrait worthy of Wolf. The only rays of sunlight filter through the rough-hewn textures of "Box Of Cedar", a kind of celebration of life in the midst of a requiem ("I'm going to tell everybody that I'm glad to see you, even though you're coming home in a box of cedar"). And the other murder ballad, "Bed Of Solid Stone" (a title that says it all...), closes the album in the only way possible.

A fascinating hybrid of sepulchral, Bert Jansch-style folk and hypnotic psychedelia, Ballads Of Living And Dying is a debut of extraordinary maturity for a 23-year-old, the ideal calling card for entering the pantheon of the new century's folksingers.

Just a year later came The Saga Of Mayflower May, another eleven sketches of spare, enchanting folk. The overture "Under An Old Umbrella" is downright moving: Nadler's insistent fingerpicking sets the backdrop for a dirge of infinite sorrow, the kind that tears your heart apart. And when the flute (courtesy of Nick Castro) enters to accompany the other splendid medieval litany "The Little Famous Song", the listener is utterly floored, won over by this siren who sings like a 13th-century Provençal damsel, with a grace and melodiousness that feel otherworldly.

With "Mr. John Lee", Marissa drops to a slightly lower register, delivering with a blues-singer's swagger another tale of love irretrievably lost. The strumming of "Yellow Lights" leads into another elegant ballad, where sadness is tinged with the red of rubies and blood ("drinking rubies in the rain"... "red the blood inside the old tree"), the green of meadows ("green the colour of the grasses") and the colors of eyes ("Oh, Mary, don't you die/ Cause of the color of her eyes").

The saga of Mayflower May continues like an unbroken dream, pining over the piano tears of "Old Love Haunts Me In the Morning" (another stunning melody sealing an ode to love and death) and the delights of fingerpicking — this time leaning more toward American folk-country — on "In The Time Of The Lorry Low" and "Calico", or the angelic choirs and vocal inlays of "Horses And Their Kin", which closes the album in a state of full ecstatic trance.

Marissa Nadler speaks the language of a universal folk tradition, ranging from Joni Mitchell to that forgotten angel of Breton folk, Veronique Chalot. Cohen's muse (and, indirectly, Cave's) dominates instead on the lyrical side, as elegiac and delicate as it is darkly gothic.

Even more profound and touching than its predecessor, The Saga Of Mayflower May is a record to be kept in a treasure chest, like a precious old jewel.

For her third record in four years, Songs III: Bird On The Water (2007), Marissa Nadler benefited from the backing of a new label, the UK's Peacefrog, and from production by Greg Weeks, as well as the participation of two more Espers musicians, Jesse Sparhawk (mandolin, harp) and Otto Hauser (percussion).

Working with cello, guitar and synth as a frame for her crystalline mezzo-soprano, the graceful Massachusetts damsel above all confirms her growth as a musician and singer. And the enormous evocative power of her spectral voice remains intact, sounding as if it comes from another age entirely. The skeleton of her icy ghost-ballads is unchanged, but the arrangements are now less bare, with the odd distorted electric guitar beefing up the sound.

Compared to The Saga of Mayflower May, however, the melodic framework feels weaker: gone are those radiant openings that floored listeners in spine-tingling madrigals like "Under An Old Umbrella" or "Famous Song", and at times Marissa indulges in one too many affectations. Paradoxically, it's precisely her newfound confidence in her own abilities that seems to have reined in her songwriting, dulling the almost "primal" pathos that once pervaded it.

But class will out, and the psychedelic glimmers of "Mexican Summer", poised between Calexico and Mazzy Star, along with the hushed palpitations of "Dying Breed", are enough on their own to outclass swarms of singer-songwriters in skirts (and otherwise). Then there's the modern folksinger, flirting with electronics (the dazed keyboards of "Bird On Your Grave") and with angular guitars ("Rachel"), without giving up her classic Joan Baez-style inflection (the single "Diamond Heart", perhaps the best ballad of the lot). And the patron saint Cohen lives on too, cast in (even more) shadowy tones on the cover of "Famous Blue Raincoat". The rest, however, stays trapped under glass, with few sparks and a lot of craftsmanship.

Marissa Nadler's gothic, mesmeric lyricism still fascinates, but it fails to fully express itself on her third record. Still, if it helps introduce the world to the talent of this bewitching siren, Songs III: Bird On The Water will be anything but a pointless record.

Continuing down the road opened up by Songs III: Bird On The Water and having abandoned the dusty folk-revival caravan, on Little Hells, her fourth album in five years, the Washington singer-songwriter turns her gaze towards the placid, dreamy shores of dream-pop and a psychedelic pop in the vein of Mazzy Star, without cutting ties to her roots, still firmly planted on the slopes of the Appalachians.

For the occasion, a supporting cast assembles under the banner of her new label, New York's Kemado. At the controls are Chris Coady (Cat Power, Tv On The Radio, Blonde Redhead, !!!) and "Farmer" Dave Scher (a collaborator of Elvis Costello and Interpol), while Simone Pace, drummer of Blonde Redhead, joins her trusty collaborator Myles Baer aka Black Hole Infinity. The result is richer arrangements, charged with electronics and a sturdier rhythm section. Nothing feels forced, though: the new sound works, even if it sometimes ends up sacrificing a bit of the fingerpicking Marissa is famously so skilled at.

The furthest point reached by this new deal is the whirling "Mary Comes Alive", where a drum machine pattern dictates an obsessive cadence, over which an insistent guitar progression and a synth line are grafted. Such a dense frame, however, doesn't undermine Nadler's performance, as she grapples with yet another moving reflection on the seasons of love and life. The single "River Of Dirt" also rests on a polished rhythm section, with powerful drumming and a driving bass riff bulking up the ethereal tones of her singing, while the closing "Mistress" sounds almost cheerful in its country gait.

Marissa breathes glassy words into the thrilling music-box chime of "Heart Paper Lover", pines away in the diaphanous lullaby of "Brittle Crushed And Torn", and balances the requiem of "The Whole Is Wide" on two piano notes. Her voice remains the principal instrument, able to change the face of a song with a single sigh. And so sometimes even the barest of trimmings is enough, as on the title track, a portrait of a shattered heart painted on a dream-country canvas, or on the insistent arpeggio of "Ghosts And Lovers", a desolate litany with her heart in her throat.

The "atmospheric" qualities of Nadler's sound resurface above all in the whirlwind of "Loner", where a sepulchral organ holds the reins.

If one had to pick a single track that best condenses all these insights, the choice would fall on "Rosary", a waltz of seductive beauty, cradled in the reverb of a slide guitar and enchanted vocal melodies.

Marissa Nadler has by now broadened her sonic spectrum, honing her songwriting in the name of a sophisticated elegance that only occasionally compromises the raw visceral quality of her approach, even if the formal and emotional high point of The Saga Of Mayflower May remains out of reach. The storytelling of this poet with a noir sensibility, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and the darkest corners of the Victorian age, also reaffirms its full worth.

In 2011 the Washington singer-songwriter returns with a self-produced record largely funded by her own fans, the self-titled Marissa Nadler. She takes the opportunity to "strip away", at least in part, some of her defining traits, from her steady, contrapuntal fingerpicking to the mythological, heavily allegorical breadth of her lyrics.

Marissa thus takes the not inconsiderable risk of disappointing her own longtime fans — those who stood by her through the making of this record, which the artist herself acknowledges as an evolution of her style. Perhaps for this very reason, Marissa Nadler is the album that required the longest span of writing and production in her career.

Already with Little Hells something of this need to broaden her expressive range had been felt. The 2009 record already contained some of the variations presented here, but it still held onto that unsettling gothic allure, the dream of lovelorn ghosts that drew in Nadler's listeners.

On Marissa Nadler, by contrast, the rough edges dissolve in favor of polished country-pop pieces with (all too) explanatory titles ("The Sun Always Reminds Of You", "Puppet Master", "In A Magazine"), venturing into the dreamy sentimental melodrama of Julee Cruise's "Baby, I Will Leave You In The Morning" or the psychedelic waltz of the graveyard wedding in "Wedding" (revisited in a sparer form on "Alabaster Queen").

Her many admirers, though, can take comfort in finding, beyond the numerous tracks that still bear Nadler's trademark sound (the lovely "In Your Lair, Bear", "Little King", the reprise of "The Saga Of Mayflower May" on "Mr John Lee Revisited", "Wind Up Doll"), that her class remains intact — above all in her now-familiar vocal prowess, perhaps capable on its own of elevating the not always brilliant compositional fabric of "Marissa Nadler".

All told, there's not much to fear in this listen, but not much to hold onto either, on a record where fiction — not just in the lyrics — no longer seems to be the focal point of Marissa Nadler's artistic expression.

Having tossed aside the muddled experimental ambitions and the more layered arrangements of her recent records, on The Sister (2012) the Washington songwriter goes back to doing what she does best. And the result is an enchantment reawakened from the darkness of frozen, spectral woods, where her music has always dwelt. Mesmerizing, utterly irresistible vocalizations, wedded almost exclusively to the unnatural grace of her fingerpicking. And, finally, new melodies of real pedigree, the kind that pour out of her fluid and unstoppable, as if she were in a trance, possessed by some ancestral, unsettling muse.

No more synthetic trappings, as on the previous self-titled album and on Little Hells: almost the only company here is her voice, lost in the wind and almost unnatural, with its spectral, gothic shadings. A spell that begins right from the opening, aching "The Wrecking Ball Company" and continues into the frozen, gorgeous melody of "Love Again, There Is A Fire", chiseled around dreamlike choirs and the hypnotic allure of Nadler's voice. It takes very little to unleash the magic, as among the shadowy paths of "Christine", another skeletal litany, barely thickened by supporting male vocals. If "Apostle" showcases above all Marissa's now-considerable skill in the art of fingerpicking, the tale of "Constantine", the ex-rockstar ravaged by codeine, still wears the guise of a timeless ballad, made of languor and suspended sorrow.

The slight dip in the closing stretch doesn't undermine the achievement of a precious record, probably the best Nadler has written since the days of the Mayflower May saga, proof of a talent that her last few lesser outings had only temporarily dimmed.

Like a siren bound by a curse, Marissa is forced to rediscover simplicity and humility in order to bring her magic back to life.

Time, in any case, is a gentleman, and Marissa Nadler is finally starting to receive the recognition she has always deserved. By the mid-2010s, she is an artist of internationally acknowledged standing, as shown by the attention of the world's leading outlets, a string of prestigious collaborations, and, not least, the double label backing for her new album, July (2014): Sacred Bones (the label of Crystal Stilts, Zola Jesus and Case Studies) for the US, and a songwriting institution like Bella Union for Europe.

If on her previous record Marissa had seemed almost forced to rediscover simplicity and humility in order to bring her magic back to life, on her new album — thanks in part to production from doom specialist Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Wolves In The Throne Room) — it's precisely the tracks with the richest arrangements that stand out. Starting with the splendid single "Dead City Emily", where the sinister lapping of Steve Moore's synths merges with the echoes of electric guitar, in a spectral, suffocating atmosphere in which Nadler's typically reverb-drenched vocalizations end up almost swallowed by the mixing desk.

It's as if the grandiose power of Sunn O)))'s metallic soundscapes had dissolved into a haze of fragile harmonic textures, like those of the album's other standout, the aching "Was It A Dream", in which a lost-sounding Nadler questions the end of a relationship, while strings swell the pathos and a searing electric guitar scars a tender melody. A renewed versatility in the arrangements also enriches the piano interlude of "I've Got Your Name" and the following "Desire", where an obsessive guitar and Marissa's mesmerizing voice weave into the flow of the keyboards, for a new romance of love and reckoning. Just as heartfelt, and diaphanous at once, is the chant of "Anyone Else", resting on an insistent drone, in a play of light and shadow sharpened by the intensity of the choral vocals.

Where she dares, in short, Nadler doesn't lose her bearings. But hers remains a classic, traditional folk framework, whose trademark lies in her characteristic wintry vignettes. And so the ghosts resurface among the skeletons of bare, frozen trees on "1923", a chamber piece, with the tremor of Eyvind Kang's strings, Phil Wandscher's treated guitar, and a few distant drums supporting a litany lost in the wind. And once again we savor the delight of a fingerpicking style that's never trite, a natural foil for Nadler's vocal harmonies, now almost whispered in an atypical spoken-word style ("Holiday In"), now supported by elegant organ and pedal-steel arrangements, as on the opening "Drive", a painful crucible of memories and sensations. These are acrobatics performed on a very thin wire, which don't always come off entirely (the country-flavored celebration of summers and "Independence Day" on "Firecrackers", the slightly contrived dirge of "We Are Coming Back", the subdued piano farewell of "Nothing In My Heart"). But that pleasant sense of disorientation that ensnares, like the song of sirens, anyone navigating the grooves of Nadler's discography, always lingers.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. So Marissa Nadler reaffirms her apparently unlikely partnership with Dunn on Strangers (2016), her eighth album in 12 years. A work that dares even more, plunging Nadler's crystalline mezzo-soprano into a bubbling magma of processed guitars and reverb, and intensifying her use of drumming. To the point that, in some cases — and perhaps for the first time in her career — one ends up paying more attention to the sounds than to the melodies. Take the solemn march of "Hungry Is The Ghost", with one guitar clattering and another pulsing out the rhythm, gradually joined by synths, pedal steel and piano to soften the roar of the distortion. Or the ghost orchestra of "Katie I Know" — one of the album's most layered and evocative arrangements — where a sturdy rhythm is set against guitar embroidery and soft dream-pop textures brushed in by organ, synth and strings, while Marissa's celestial voice recounts the end of a toxic relationship.

Even the more pastoral episodes seem less diaphanous than before, nonetheless shot through with a subtle but palpable tension: from the crescendo of acoustic chord progressions on "Skyscraper" to the funereal horns of "Waking", all the way to the almost western twang that scars the melancholy of "Nothing Feels The Same". The sole exception, perhaps, is the closing elegy "Dissolve", the track closest to the bare fingerpicking of her early work. But the range of her lyrics also widens, moving from autobiography toward more universal themes such as loneliness and despair, with touches that are at times even apocalyptic and surreal. The strangers referenced in the title — wounded, disillusioned and alone — are perhaps nothing more than the external projection of the unconscious and the demons of their loving creator.

An album that, overall, sounds even more accessible than many of its predecessors. And if a Marissa Nadler song were ever to become a hit, the prime suspect would be "Janie In Love", the album's natural single: another lullaby lost on the wind, with reverbed guitars and dissonant violins cracking the ecstatic rapture of its melody, while Nadler's voice drops into lower registers before the chorus explodes, propped up by a beat more powerful than ever before. But the richer sonic architecture doesn't smother Nadler's magnetic vocal presence, light as a sea breeze amid the piano chimes and choirs of "Divers In The Dust", more noir and spectral amid the country languor of the title track (with electric guitar and pedal steel front and center), nor does it compress her melodic gift, which blooms again on the hymn-like "All The Colors Of The Dark", which truly condenses every shade of her expressive palette, with an otherworldly, fairy-tale grace: "This is not your world anymore", she proclaims — and seems almost to be speaking to herself — within a hypnotic frame of strings and keyboards.

While it's true that the vigor of the guitars and the heavier use of echo and reverb broaden the pathos, the comparison some have drawn with the Lana Del Rey of "Ultraviolence" and thereabouts seems misleading: there's none of that erotic-noir diva carnality, that lascivious, surreal take on the torch-song format.

Marissa doesn't flirt with pop; she stays faithful to the rigid canons of the folksinger and to the gothic vision of her ancestral world. Dunn's input at the console, however, is gradually coaxing her out of her shell of shyness. And who knows — after all the gems she's turned out over this dozen years, maybe the moment has finally come for her to grasp success.

Two years later, with For My Crimes (2018), the American singer-songwriter restores the spectral folk of her early albums; what remains constant, though, is the gallery of female characters populating the eleven tracks, protagonists of stories steeped in romance and nostalgia, over which looms the specter of domestic violence. And it's here that Marissa Nadler's writing reveals the subtle evolution that has taken her from imaginary tales to recounting everyday stories ("Dream Dream Big In The Sky"), this time focusing on the hardships of relationships between men and women ("You're Only Harmless When You Sleep").

True to its title, For My Crimes explores country-gothic-noir sonic territory that at times recalls Laura Fraser and her band Tarnation ("Are You Really Gonna Move To The South?"), but also Hope Sandoval ("All Out Of Catastrophes") and the Cowboy Junkies ("Flamethrower"), while the long list of collaborators (among others Janel Leppin, Mary Lattimore, Eva Gardner, Patty Schemel) adds a few small new touches to the songwriter's repertoire.

It's hard not to notice the slight harmonic revolution Angel Olsen works on the delightful title track, or the perfect synergy with Sharon Van Etten on "Lover Release Me", and above all the unexpected swerve into electrified folk on "Blue Vapor", the fruit of a collaboration with Dum Dum Girls singer Kristen Kontrol, plus the precious presence of Dana Colley's sax from Morphine: the only male presence on the whole record. A trio of songs clearly above the record's already high standard confirms the soundness of Nadler's decision to return to the raw, aching folk of her early albums: the poetic candor and lyrical energy of "I Can't Listen To Gene Clark Anymore" invites lofty comparisons (Bob Dylan), the shadowy tone of the chords and vocals on "Interlocking" even stirs up the ghost of This Mortal Coil, and, last but not least, the gentle, delicate outline of the autobiographical "Said Goodbye To That Car" ventures a melody so simple yet so effective that it evokes the Beatles' "Blackbird".

After two innovative albums, July and Strangers, Marissa Nadler's new project will strike many as a record devoid of surprises — or perhaps the real surprise lies precisely in the natural, instinctive freshness of eleven songs so plain and simple that they go straight to the listener's heart, not without first leaving a light scratch on the skin.

And even deeper are the scratches Nadler inflicts with the project alongside Stephen Brodsky (Cave In, Mutoid Man, New Idea Society and Old Man Gloom), released in 2019 despite having been conceived years earlier. Droneflower pushes the artistic boundaries of both musicians, developing idioms that are partly uncharted territory for each: the meeting point between Nadler's crystalline mezzo-soprano voice and Brodsky's metal, hardcore and progressive-rock background lies in the darkness and ever-fascinating world of gothic-folk. It's a record born of constant shifts in concept, originally conceived as a potential horror-film soundtrack; of that original idea, only the intensity of the images the music manages to conjure remains.

It almost feels as though the ten songs had already been created in some parallel universe, simply waiting to be captured and revealed to mere mortals — the way a painter captures the poetry of a sunset, unveiling unseen shades of it — so these two musicians' slightly dissonant sonic snapshots renew a sense of wonder and amazement.

A cover of Guns N' Roses' "Estranged" sits proudly at the center of the album's sequence, giving rise to one of its most epic and evocative moments, but it's the minimal, cinematic "Space Ghost I" and "Space Ghost II" that serve as the leitmotif for Droneflower's atmospheres. And it's in these dark spaces that Brodsky engineers some of the most interesting and intriguing musical excursions, first with a series of bittersweet electric-guitar chords on "Watch The Time", then with rough, spectral, mutating chords that blur the perception of the vocal lines, shifting from ethereal, velvety atmospheres toward darker, more ancestral tones. A rougher, more malevolent spirituality takes hold of "For The Sun", with the two musicians dancing over nimble electric chords and howling sonic textures, skillfully balanced between dream and nightmare. A synergy partly echoed in the album's other cover, Morphine's "In Spite Of Me" (with Dana Colley on sax).

What seemed like an offhand side project destined only for Marissa Nadler's most curious fans instead turns out to be a small treasure chest of precious gems; with Brodsky's help, the singer-songwriter uncovered yet another dark side of her complex artistic persona.

After releasing the limited-edition covers album Instead Of Dreaming (2021), capable of ranging with surprising ease from King Crimson to the Bee Gees, from Bob Dylan to America, Marissa Nadler shuts herself away in her new home in Nashville, where she lives through a peculiar lockdown, obsessively drawn to episodes of the docuseries "The Unsolved Mysteries", Netflix's reworking of an old TV format that, apparently, she had devoured as a child.

It's precisely out of that forced isolation and that narrative spark that her new album The Path Of The Clouds (2021) is born, on which, for the first time, she composes most of the songs on piano rather than guitar, surrounded by an interesting roster of guests: from harpist Mary Lattimore to multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler (Mercury Rev, Midlake), her piano teacher, from singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle and Amber Webber of Black Mountain, to former Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde. The result is an ambitious, complex record, though not always as melodically inspired as its predecessors. The American folksinger found in those "unsolved mysteries" the lifeblood for new, obsessive noir ballads, suspended once again between reality and fantasy, past and present. And if the impression is that this time the emphasis has shifted more toward the stories than the songs, it's precisely on that hazy, blurred edge that the record's appeal lies: surrendering to its opiate fade-outs without resistance will undoubtedly be the ideal way to fully appreciate it.

Listeners will thus find themselves ferried by siren-Nadler down the rapids of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, back in 1928, tracing the fate of Glen and Bessie Hyde, newlywed adventurers honeymooning in their canoe, over the lapping of a delicate acoustic guitar arpeggio propped up by synth bass, before the chorus unfolds into a wall of keyboard drones, horns and piano, pondering their disappearance with that repeated "Did you make it?" ("Bessie, Did You Make It", echoing the vocative device of "Katie, I Know"). And they'll lose themselves on the "path of the clouds" of D.B. Cooper, who on November 24, 1971 hijacked a Boeing 727 and, with $200,000 in ransom money in his pocket, parachuted out and vanished without a trace along with his loot: an occasion for reflecting on what it means to take control of one's own destiny, which permeates the elegant title track, among the best cuts of the lot, with its layers of bass and sparse touches of harpsichord paired with flute and distorted guitars. Or listeners will plunge into the icy waters of the ocean, following with bated breath the fate of the 1966 Alcatraz prison escapees amid the bluesy languor of "Well Sometimes You Just Can't Stay". And confirming that this fixation on the unsolved-mysteries series is the record's true obsession is the sampled voice of the late actor Robert Stack, host of the original version of the show, amid the dreamy opalescence of "From Vapor To Stardust".

Surrendering to the spell of these vaporous, oceanic sounds, one sometimes gets precisely the impression of "breathing underwater" ("If I Could Breathe Underwater", with an intriguing bassline, Lattimore's harp, fluttering drums and sighing choirs backing up another of Nadler's mesmerizing litanies on supernatural powers), of losing oneself in a spell with the glittering sway of a waltz on "And I Dream Of Running", carried out in tandem with Rundle, as is "Turned Into Air" (with electric jolts needling the ecstasy of the fingerpicking), the bare, desperate prayer of "Storm", the quiet devastation of "Elegy" (with Lattimore's metaphysical harp, synths and horns to the fore) and the bluesy solemnity of "Couldn't Have Done The Killing", a murder ballad in which the protagonist defends herself against a murder charge and which — despite the record's piano-based framework — reveals that it's above all the (gorgeous) guitars that surface from the watery eddies of the arrangements, backed up in this special mission by "Well Sometimes You Just Can't Stay".

With the warmth of tinkling strings wrapping around a loving lullaby, "Lemon Queen" closes the album on a cinematic, gloomy note: “Higher and higher / Above you,” hisses Marissa's mezzo-soprano, leaving yet another mystery unresolved - namely, whether the person she's speaking to can still hear her at all.

“It’s always midnight in my heart”, confesses a disarmed Nadler on “Elegy”. And perhaps that's exactly why she's so easy to love, always and unconditionally. Even when, as on “The Path Of The Clouds”, she challenges listeners to attempt - more than just a listen - a full psychological and emotional transference. Not everyone can pull it off, but doing so can yield new, unfamiliar pleasures. Because music, deep down, always remains an unsolved mystery.

With New Radiations the artist doesn't betray expectations, nor does she try to update her sound: sparer arrangements and the absence of drums and percussion underline the more earthbound nature of the new album, but unease and emotional vulnerability remain central. The more intimate, crepuscular tone is established right away by the delicate acoustic guitar chords of “It Hits Harder”, a song dedicated to the first woman to fly solo around the world, Geraldine Mock - a theme that returns even more forcefully on “Weightless Above The Water” (the most intense track), whose protagonist is the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova. Marissa Nadler's noir lullabies are caressing and romantic, as if suspended in a parallel world (“Bad Dreams Summertime”, “Smoke Screen Selene”), not without echoes of country-western (“If It’s An Illusion”) and alluring cosmic-folk vibrations (“Hatchet Man”). The title track stays true to the folk-noir atmosphere of New Radiations, but allows itself a biting finale, in sharp contrast with the mournful country nature of “You Called Her Camillia”, the evanescent “To Be The Moon King”, and the even more angelic “Light Years”.

Despite its title, New Radiations is a record devoid of innovative elements, but predictability never comes at the expense of quality: fragile yet melodically impeccable, these new songs remain deliberately dusty, wan. Marissa Nadler remains a singular voice; her music is a form of art, which is why it isn't instantly graspable in its entirety. More than a portrait, New Radiations is an artist's sketch, an album to return to now and then in search of answers, but above all of questions.

Contributions by Lorenzo Righetto (“Marissa Nadler”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“For My Crimes”, “Droneflower”, “New Radiations”)

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