At work the other day, I was asked the typical question by one of my co-workers: "What are you listening to these days?" A fairly easy question to answer, I mentioned a few things and included the new album by Nina Nastasia. Not knowing who she was, my co-worker pressed me to describe what her music sounds like. Usually able to expound at length on such a subject (see my other reviews on this site if you doubt me), I found myself grasping for some catagory to fit Ms. Nastasia into or some simple way to describe her music. Instead of actual speech, I sputtered and did a half-shrug, wishing I had the CD on me to play for him. And then it hit me that I also had a review to write about this disc for this here website. Uh-oh........
There is no easy way to talk about the songs found on this, Ms. Nastasia's 3rd full-length and second for Touch & Go. In fact, producer Steve Albini recently noted that (I'm paraphrasing here) that when you describe her music, it sounds like something you wouldn't want to listen to at all. That might be taking it a bit far, but is bordering on the truth. To use a phrase that I dropped when trying to describe American Music Club to a friend, it sounds like the perfect music for a bar. Not any hopped-up white blues or shitty cover band, but rather the perfect mixture of beauty and sadness that seems to inform most nights drinking at your favorite watering hole.
The music on this new album is spare and elliptical, prone to weave around a song rather than lead it in a straight line. On any one song, hints of cello or violin or even the slightest touch of a piano will accent just so much and then get taken up by the sound of a hammered dulcimer. Yes there are the typical instrumentation of drums, bass, and guitar, but it is the little accents that will haunt your memories of this CD. Equally haunting and laying over the top of it all like a beautiful feline is the honeyed voice of Ms. Nastasia herself. Even when singing a line such as "My clothes are scattered, my skull is fractured" (from The Body), it is completely enrapturing. There are hints of Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell in her voice, but only hints. Those vocal cords are all her own and will have you ensnared by the middle of the first song.
As you might have guessed from the lyrics quoted above, there's a black streak running through all these proceedings as well. Each song is accented with a small drop of blood or bile that can be both bolstered or offset by the droning strings and simple, almost pleading acoustic guitar. Probably the finest song to be found on this disc, Regrets, is probably the purest example of what I'm speaking of here. As Ms. Nastasia plucks her guitar in an almost Nick Drake-like fashion followed every dreamy step by the drumming of Dirty Three's Jim White, she spins a tale of a cheap LA motel and waiting for your man to cop some heroin. The desperation and confusion is spelled out on the surface of this song with each off beat slap of the drums by Mr. White and the visions of a "plastic room" and hearing the "Spanish screams of girlfriends in the other rooms". As you're dizzied by all the images, out of the near-chaos comes a falsetto voice urging you to "make no regrets". Then, all falls quiet with a low pluck of her guitar and an almost soothing reminder: "Don't slow down this time". Not since Neil Young wrote his most infamous black tar stained song has there been a more gorgeous and ugly ode to junkiedom.
And there's my attempt at describing her music. As you will hear when you pick up this new album (and by god, you should go right out and do just that when you are finished reading this), you can't boil it down to a "sounds like A + B" type statement. There's too much wisdom, ache, joy, and loss found in each of these songs to warrant such a watered down description. |