Pitchfork 76

Marissa Nadler doesn't seem like she's from here. She seems like a transitional spirit from another era—some dark and medieval place, a real-life Melisandre with an angelic tenor. Her music, a regal gothic folk, is equally soothing and haunting, and like singer-songwriters Angel Olsen and Laura Gibson, Nadler doesn’t need much behind her sonically to make an impact.

In years past, it was simply her and and guitar, singing of loss and regret. She occasionally seemed shy or reserved, but she’s opened up more with each album, and on Strangers, Nadler offers traces of her life—discussing personal friends on “Janie in Love” and “Katie I Know,” and, on “All the Colors of the Dark,” walking us through the house of an old flame. “Divers of the Dust,” the album’s panoramic opener, wrestles with heartbreak, yet as always with Nadler, she leaves the words open for broad interpretation: “Lying here, on the rocks, with the cliffs disintegrating/Last I heard, in the end, the waves were scraping city streets.”

Compared with Nadler’s 2014 LP, July, Strangers moves away from folk into more accessible terrain. Produced by Randall Dunn, who’s worked with Sunn O))), Earth, and the Cave Singers, these sounds are edgier, supplementing Nadler’s bleak aesthetic with layered strings, percussion and guitar, resulting in a rock-oriented sound that lends itself to a wider group of listeners. Even the more pastoral songs like “Skyscraper,” “Waking,” and “Dissolve,” feel heavier, not as gentle as her previous work. Nadler’s music is an acquired taste, but Strangers is probably her most expansive release to date.

As with any Nadler recording, this isn’t a stark turn from her usual vibe. The strength of this album lies in its subtle shifts, the way it casually unfolds without getting stuck. Dunn produces heavy metal, which fits neatly within Nadler's grey-skies approach; even the acoustic songs have a fierceness to them. She's been isolated on her records before, but here the music feels spacious and robust like the workings of a full ensemble in which ideas are allowed to flow. There’s an overwhelming connectivity to her music: As Nadler exorcises her own demons, she brings you along with her, making you feel a little less anxious about your own despair. She sees poetry in the mundane, elegance in the gloom.

Drowned In Sound 70

This is mostly a good thing. She made some fine acoustic folk albums back in the day, and her darkly languorous voice will always be the main, defining instrument on her records. But as a rule the fuller the music the more atmospheric her songs have proven, and her tones are clearly perfectly suited to the thick, hazy musical waters plied by Beach House et al.

The trade off is that this sort of melodic, dreamy, keyboard-augmented music isn’t especially chilling, which has previously been one of the more compelling characteristics of her work. You wouldn’t be off the mark to describe her first four albums as ‘death-obsessed’ and certainly it’s not a stretch to see her as being in the lineage of fellow New Englanders HP Lovecraft or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose claustrophobic masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper felt like a twin lost in time to Nadler's magnificently unsettling last set, July.

But actually a slow drift towards the light has been discernible in Nadler’s work for a while now: 2011’s eponymous set was a practically wholesome folk record, and is probably her weakest effort; she set things right withJuly, a stufling, disturbing record, but also a mature one that had moved beyond the slightly OTT symbolism of her early work.

Strangers is considerably lighterthan its predecessor, with none of July’s sense of cracked, fevered nostalgia. But where Marissa Nadler missed the mark by stripping away both the darkness and the interesting musical experiments of its predecessor Little Hells, Strangers fills the space left by doom and gloom with heady sonic experimentation .

When Strangers really kicks into gear – as it most notably does on its extraordinary centrepiece ‘Hungry is the Ghost’, a cascading, slow motion, six-minute roar of distortion that takes her into something bordering on shoe gaze territory – it’s completely breathtaking. Gliding in on a wave of elegiac keys, Nadler spins a story of detachment “looking through windows into other people’s rooms” that start pretty and builds into something stupendous, her cool tones slicing through an ascent of roaring guitars and martial drums. Isolated, it wouldn’t be her most powerful vocal, but contrasted with the tumultuous backing it’s remarkable, a singer in complete control of her voice, its tones, its textures.

When the music is less overwhelming, you notice that July knob-twiddler Randall Dunn’s clean production and Nadler’s move away from the depths of morbidity have changed something about her music. It’s less intimate, less unsettling - a song like opener ‘Divers of the Dust’ is gorgeous, but it doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, it doesn’t have that strange, dust-covered antique feel that July and Little Hells and Songs III evoked so piercingly. And there’s an open-armed melodicism – a catchiness, if you will – on songs like ‘Katie I Know’ and ‘Janie in Love’ that would verge on the poppy if the tune went a splash faster, if her vocals were less keening.

But is this really a problem? As a fanboy, I am perhaps in a slight, over-entitled funk that this isn’t exactly the record I wanted. But Nadler hasn't sold out, just moved on a bit, and if the emotional impact has diminished, the sonic one has increased by way of balance. I’m almost exactly the same age as her, and I’m sure things have changed for both of us in the 12 years since she made her debut with Songs of Living and Dying. Expecting her to keep sighing out bleakness when that’s not where she’s at is clearly a bit churlish. “I used to be like you” she coos on the majestic ‘Janie in Love’, a song that seems to see her move a little towards an elder statesperson role – leaving the misery for the next generation.

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

Marissa Nadler
Strangers

[Sacred Bones; 2016]

Rating: 3/5