While Marissa Nadler currently lives in Nashville, in many respects the music of New Radiations may feel more comfortable on the English moors or in the early New England countryside. Between the often gauzy, layered vocals and her sometimes shocking subject matter she has created an album that haunts listeners, take them to locales miles away from standard singer-songwriter fare. She weaves a spell with her guitar and the slide and keyboards of Milky Burgess, transporting listeners to other realms.
The guitar that opens ‘It Hits Harder’ is a thing of simplicity, while the first words we hear, “I will fly around the world just to forget you,” inspire a song about Geraldine Monk, the first woman to fly around the world solo. Yet the song deals more directly with notions of saying goodbye. Such is the transformative magic of her songs. They live in a world where one thing leads to another even if the relationship between the two isn’t always obvious.
While the connections may not always seem apparent, Nadler finds a way to marry concepts uniquely. ‘You Called Her Camellia’ came from watching a documentary, Motorcycle Mama. Instead of examining the freedom, she casts an eye to the person left behind. That shift, along with the simple guitar track of the song, leads some to describe it as a countryish tune. The presentation along with the layered vocals seem miles away, even as the slide guitar notes echo.
Proving that nothing is exactly as it seems, ‘Hatchet Man’ moves with a graceful guitar as it documents a man taking a woman home. Instead of a love song, the man in question has a more homicidal intent, taking the woman home to murder her in front of the watching narrator. The melody beguiles even as the song goes in a direction far darker than murder ballads like ‘Long Black Veil’.
Under Nadler’s spell, she takes the rudiments of a song and bends them to her will. Viewing a world that could shake one to the core, she gently finds a way to enticingly allowing us to enter her sometimes strange and sinister visions of the world. From the cover image rendered in black and white, appearing almost like a classical music work, to her carefully controlled, solemnly sung works, she has the ability to transfix and transform her material. When she sings, “New radiations have taken their toll on me,” it’s obvious that is true. Marissa Nadler’s New Radiations is the work of a rare artist, one who makes the most head spinning images make sense. Hers is a rare gift.