I saw a photo of Marissa Nadler on the Kemado website and she looks like a fairy tale princess. I have to say it's a look I can live with. I'm sure she's high maintenaince but I like the whole princess thing. She can convert me from a frog and hopefully marry me so I can become sort of king. The idea of royalty is nothing but appealing .... mainly for the enormous banquets (am an easy one to please). I love banquets me.... Anyway Marissa springs her fourth album proper on to my ears. It's called Little Hells and it's a bit lovely. Her first couple of albums blew me away and the last one on Peacefrog was OK ish. There was some nice tracks on it but it was patchy. On second listen this new album is doing the business. Her voice is melty to the max and we're all being soothed off to sleep. It's very hard to work in these conditions! For those who aren't familiar with her wears she's a delightful singer songwriter with the gentlest most soothing of voices. She was lumped into the weird ladies of folk a while back with Josephine Foster but these days her music is less weird than it used to be. The tunes are all correct and present and they're presented in a more straight forward way but her voice is nothing but a delight. The title track of the album harks back to Nadler of old and is the song that swings it for me... Echoes of Julee Cruise and Hope Sandoval are all there 'n all. A lovely record...
Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.
What their label says...
It's not all that difficult to find beauty in life's more joyful
moments, but few artists are capable of doing the same for bleaker
times. Excelling at a Fahey-esque fingerpicking technique, Nadler pays
homage to some of the great early American blues players. She sings
haunting chansons of maidens, the cowboy ditties of ranchers, and the
funerary processions of mourners. On her fourth solo album, Little
Hells, Marissa Nadler proves she's well-acquainted with the splendour
of sorrow and envelops the listener into those gauzy moods.
