Marissa Nadler – July
February 2014, Sacred Bones
This review was originally published for Thebizzniz.com
Alejandro De Luna
Marissa Nadler does not mind being vulnerable and to show her more fragile side. Praised by critics but still overshadowed commercially since 2004, Nadler´s music is honest and comes from the darkest corners of the soul.
In July – her sixth full-length album – Nadler´s phantasmagorical soprano-like tones serve to exemplify the vulnerability in her lyrics that portray tragic in common scenarios: heartbreak, desolation, a fateful separation and despair, but that paradoxically opens the door for better times. With Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen as inspirations; with a guitar that rests in 70s folk music but with a dark background that could easily stick to Gothic and with a melancholic voice that leaves Lana del Rey drifting in the blue, July is an album worth exploring. Some might say that you should judge a book by its cover and with an album like this, the visual aesthetic perfectly portrays the feelings of its author: the desolation that fills her dark past and present covered by black bricks and a bright window behind anticipating a fuzzy but promising future.
In July there is a central theme: a lost love, a person who is not coming back and that Marissa Nadler recalls with nostalgia and sadness over eleven tracks. Tracks like “Drive”, exemplify these vague memories that nostalgia provides; moments that are gone as in another utopian portrait of the past in “1923”, featuring an acoustic guitar that evokes Leonard Cohen´s early bohemian-like work.
Accompanied by a claustrophobic sound, full of vocal reverbs and ambient textures, the lyrics spit the pain of Nadler´s past: ‘I died when you left’ (“We are coming back”); ‘I do not give a damn about the way / Colors on the trees change from red to green’ (“Dead city, Emily”); ‘I hardly think about you anymore / Except When I see the water and the sand on the ocean floor’ (“Anyone Else”) – that sounds like an acoustic version of Chelsea Wolfe´s goth or ‘I called you when I was drunk all the time’ (“Holiday in”) – Simon & Garfunkel-like guitar.
In “I’ve got your name”, Nadler walks away from the dark and thick folk that stuffs the disc and with a voice and piano reminiscent of Lana del Rey, our dark introspective hero explores other textures evocative to 50´s and 60´s Americana but without leaving behind the strong introspective content of the album. As in “Drive”, Nadler takes again long roads and cars as the scenery for the collection of her memoirs (‘Drove down 95, put on my eyes / In the rearviewmirror as I enter New York / You stopped calling my out my way’).
The closure track in July cannot be more heartrending. ‘Maybe is the weather but I got nothing in my heart’, Nadler sings hopeless and accompanied by a piano in “Nothing in my heart” that eloquently summarizes the atmosphere of the album: A window through the passing of time; what we leave behind and the nostalgia of not having something or someone.
It is not a depressing album, just an honest and melancholic overview about human relationships and our temporary stay in a given space and time that force us to look back in order to weigh our journey.
