Marissa Nadler

Marissa is back, at last.

She hadn't been seen in the city for a good five years: not one of those unbridgeable gaps, and yet in the meantime her career has lined up quite a few new chapters. Since the tour for “Little Hells”, already among the boldest and most colourful pages in her catalogue, the Boston siren has treated herself to a lavish getaway toward sunnier country-pop shores (her eponymous 2011 album), beaten a record-speed retreat back to her more classic sound with a thoroughly convincing return (“The Sister”), only to then embrace a happy compromise between gothic essentiality and elegant harmonic weaving (the recent “July”), finding time – as if that weren't enough – for a couple of minor releases, covers of other people's songs that are often curious but never truly essential.

The credit for this new appearance of hers in Turin, tacked on at the end of a run of Italian dates in towns decidedly livelier when it comes to concerts, goes entirely to the team that has curated the “Rowing Sessions” series for a couple of seasons now, and which has found in the welcoming loft of Superbudda (inside the historic Docks Dora warehouses) the ideal home for its musical offerings – a glimmer of light that bodes well for the end of this long Turin live-music winter. Regardless of how starved the most devoted fans were, the audience's response rang out loud and clear despite the pouring rain: just under two hundred people showed up, the space filled well ahead of time, and – judging at least from the chatter before the show – many newcomers had come on trust alone, unaware of the artist's stature but fully ready to be won over.

We expected more people back from the American thirty-three-year-old's last appearance in the area, especially since on that occasion – spring 2009, Spazio 211 – things came close to a genuine miracle. It was supposed to be a duo show with Greg Weeks, her producer on “Songs III: Bird On The Water” and her partner (alongside Ilya E. Monosov) in the wonderful, arcane interlude of the Mountain Home project, but the Espers frontman pulled out. Marissa herself, floored by a nasty bout of flu, took the stage in less-than-ideal shape, with a stash of tissues always within reach after shuttling back and forth between the bathroom and dressing room countless times. Well, despite such discouraging circumstances, the singer delivered a goosebump-inducing performance, unforgettable for its intensity and clarity, holding nothing back.

It's with this pleasant memory, tucked away in a small compartment of our elephantine memory and dusted off whenever we feel like singing Nadler's praises to some potential new fan, that we arrive at Superbudda with a smile, ready to relive and refresh that trove of emotions, hoping the circumstances will finally be ideal. Which, however, they are not. Marissa, we're told, arrived late, utterly exhausted, from Milan, where she had been busy with various promotional and fashion commitments. She has just wrapped up her soundcheck, distinguishing herself along the way for a near-maniacal perfectionism on the technical side. That a musician of such pure class refuses to leave anything to chance strikes us, in any case, as yet another good omen.

And then it begins. The lights are dimmed all the way down to “catacomb” mode, at the American's explicit request. Accompanying her, looking gorgeous even in an outfit that's a touch bolder and less grimly drained than last time, there is no band, unlike before. In the space set up as a stage in front of us, she's preceded by a blonde, Nordic-looking young woman, multi-instrumentalist Janel Leppin (of the duo Janel & Anthony), who might seem a modest presence in terms of support, only to prove the sceptics wrong at the very first opportunity. It's her cello, in fact, that takes on the task of raising the stern architecture of the opening track, a “1923” that we discover to be far more stretched out into ecstatic territory than its already languid studio version, a direction that will be confirmed many times over the course of the show.

But it's the sparingly dosed backing vocals, so marvellously entwined with Nadler's unmistakable mezzo-soprano that they come across to our ears as her natural sonic shadow, that immediately grab our attention and stir up a sense of elated wonder in us. The sound of nylon strings delicately plucked by the musician's long fingers needs nothing more to achieve the perfect shape of shadowy enchantment, which is after all the singer-songwriter's most formidable expressive gift. This genuine wealth of measured suggestion finds even more satisfying development in the following “Dead City Emily”, one of the gems of “July”. Marissa delivers yet another memorable moment thanks to her textbook fingerpicking, its clarity heightened by an even more demanding playing field in the shape of her trusty twelve-string. The real chills, however, still come from her colleague's magic, exemplary in lending unease and depth to the particularly menacing, distorted electric finale, in which her chosen instrument takes centre stage.

You could hear a pin drop. We are spellbound, and the beautiful thing is that this condition is shared by everyone sitting on the floor around us (yes, because apart from a lucky few with a chair or cushion, or those left standing at the back, the spectators closest to the stage are planted on the floor cross-legged) as if in some kind of dreamy collective reverie, as though we were all modern-day Ulysseses lashed to the mast of our imaginary ship, mesmerically exposed – not without our own delight – to the melodious arabesques of the two American sirens. The allegory, a touch well-worn as it may be, couldn't be more fitting when the two glorious voices join forces in the beguiling idyll of “Firecrackers”, perhaps one of the more straightforward pieces in Marissa's repertoire, but one that in settings like this all but guarantees the listener's unconditional surrender. Slow, charged with a sweet suspended spell, the same trick is repeated to the same effect within the seductive folds of “Drive”, before the mood subtly darkens again with the Espers-esque “Anyone Else”.

Everything seems perfect, the clarity of the acoustics pleasantly surprises us, and yet the singer can't seem to settle, repeatedly voicing her dissatisfaction – through discreet but unmistakable gestures – to the unlucky sound engineers. Fuelled by tiredness and the leading lady's fussy streak, these muted complaints will keep recurring right up to the farewell, in the “too loud”, “too quiet” and, above all, “I can't hear her” varieties, balanced out at least by the audience's thunderous applause at the end of every song, and by the girl's cryptic but heartfelt thanks, a couple of times even delivered in halting Italian.

All it takes is closing your eyes for these tiny off-notes to dissolve. And it's the same trick that gives us the illusion that the fluted trills of the extraordinary “Was It A Dream” were produced by Josephine Foster. Sweet sorcery. Marissa drives the point home once more by setting aside all three of her trusty guitars and relying on voice alone (with Leppin on synth) for an abbreviated, but as devastating as ever, version of “I've Got Your Name”, still very much in the territory of the Emily Dickinson of Colorado.

Up to this point “July” has been the undisputed star of the show, and the fact that this is something of a shame is made clear by the only two exemplary throwbacks to the past (far from distant ones, with the exception of the ancient “Fifty Five Falls”, which will close the show) included in the setlist.

Against this backdrop, “The Wrecking Ball Company” and, above all, the hypnotic “Your Heart Is A Twisted Vine” display the timeless dignity of instant classics, austere and sublime, letting us be lulled like children ready to lose themselves in a dream. The cello's last hazy reverberations, the last dance of Marissa's left hand, moving from the acoustic guitar's fretboard to her hip and back again, while her right hand draws wonders over the soundhole with sharpened nails. The triumph sealed by the adoring crowd would more than justify a return beneath the dim lights, sacrosanct as it would be; instead, canned music starts up through the speakers. We cheer even louder, and the battle between us and the jingle of the moment lasts a good minute. It seems crazy not to heed such genuine enthusiasm, but Nadler has nothing left to give, we're told, and blames the blameless sound engineers for having made her strain her voice due to a less-than-ideal equalisation. Details none of us had noticed, but no matter: can such pickiness, when it produces art this enchanting, really be called a fault? No, honestly, it can't.

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