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Marissa Nadler - Little Hells
| Pitchfork. |
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The core of Little Hells-- Marissa Nadler's elegiac and elegant fourth album-- is appropriately wedged in the middle: After moving alongside dual Wurlitzers and a theremin throughout opener "Heart Paper Lover", slowly waltzing above a country quartet on "Rosary", and augmenting a dark conversation between a man and his tired wife with industrial-iike programming and synths for "Mary Come Alive", Nadler settles back into her minimal roots for the next four tunes. During those 14 perfect minutes, it's just her voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar, augmented cautiously by piano, organ, and ripples of electronics. Surrounded by little else but her own melancholy, Nadler sums up her career's existential despair: "Ghosts and lovers/ They will haunt you for a while," she sings. And while they do, Little Hells suggests through 10 of Nadler's best songs yet, the sadness will either kill you or keep you going. Nadler's earlier albums delivered this somberness almost exclusively through songs for acoustic guitar. On those records, her backing musicians seemed intent upon emphasizing the spectral, lost-love tendencies of her words, adding ominous cello shrieks, sinister electric leads, or raggedy lo-fi touches, which found her tagged from the start as a freak-folk artist. As late as her most recent album-- the exquisite breakthrough Songs III: Bird on the Water-- she did little to dispel that categorization, filling the record with archaic language and outsider accompaniment by New England experimentalists like multi-instrumentalist Greg Weeks and cellist Helena Espvall....full text |
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| Dustedmagazine |
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There remains in some circles an oft-cited misconception that happy people don’t often make good art. Birthed with reference to the tumultuous psyches of figures like Van Gogh, the hypothesis isn’t without its arguments (had Kafka been a carefree guy, it’s safe to say his writing might’ve been a tad less compelling), but it seems a tad presumptuous to go too far in correlating artistic output with psychological wellbeing. So what of Marissa Nadler, contemporary folkstress? Nadler’s always been a songwriter and performer of emotional heft, but 2007’s Songs III: Bird on the Water was packed with a markedly haunting pathos, musing on death, sadness and mourning with an elegiac beauty. On Little Hells, Nadler’s latest effort, the tone isn’t always so somber, but the disc is hardly sunnier than its predecessor. By all accounts, Nadler’s not a gloomy person, she’s simply someone adept at getting in touch with life’s darker side, and an artist skillful enough to make exceedingly palpable the emotion with which she imbues her work. Little Hells may not deviate much tonally from Songs III, but the execution and arrangement of Nadler’s compositions is where this disc makes a departure. "Rosary" and "Mistress" feature steady percussion amidst the ether, and Nadler’s folk is garnished with a ghostly country vibe on more than one occasion. By and large, these are welcome additions to Nadler’s sound; though she’s an adroit guitar player, the augmentation of Nadler’s acoustic with a broader timbral palette is often a boon to her music’s striking atmosphere....full text |
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| Blogcritics |
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Some artists have such perfectly serene voices that they'd still mesmerize you even if they were singing about hell, damnation, and sex. Having grew up in the Northeast, Marissa Nadler was influenced by the region's rustic and calming setting. It's no wonder that Nadler's angelic sound is deeply rooted in a more traditional folk ambiance lacking even less than a hint of the contemporary. Atmosphere and tone are Nadler's musical signatures to which even she isn't adverse to tinkering with: "If a song is good, you should be able to do it in any style and transform it, take a risk and have some fun," (press release)....full text |
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