Songs III: Bird on the Water (Album Review)

There is something about death that fascinates the mind to no end. What Hamlet called “the undiscovered country” looms in the background of every living being, promising to strike but never announcing when it will. And while few want to be there when it finally happens, it has to be said that when it comes to remedies for fear, few are as potent as death. Were you to consider the fact that your days are numbered, and that your light will soon be spent, the fears you once had about money and status would quickly melt into air. Put it this way: if you knew you had only a day to live, you probably wouldn’t spend it at the bank.

Accuse me of being morbid, but there’s a time and place for thinking these thoughts. And while that time may not come very often, if you listen to Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, you’ll be in the right frame of mind to do so. Every song on the American folk musician’s excellent album is suffused with death, which alongside love is a recurring theme here. But like Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans, to which the album bears certain stylistic and thematic resemblances, it is never sad or depressing. If anything, Marissa manages somehow to make songs about death and love eerily uplifting.

The opening song Diamond Heart encapsulates the approach of the entire album, opening with gentle plucking and the soothing singing of an angel whose voice reaches the highest notes with graceful ease. Equally poised are her lyrics, which like those of Leonard Cohen, whose song Famous Blue Raincoat Marissa covers elsewhere on the album, can tell a story with an economy of words. The refrain: “Your father died / A month ago, / And he scattered his ashes / In the snow,” is revealing because it tells the listener that the lover, whom she is addressing, is as dead as his father. Otherwise were the lover still alive, she would have no need to tell him of his father’s passing, as he would have found it out for himself.

The following songs sound just as beautifully haunted, as if Marissa were communicating to friends beyond the grave. Mexican Summer is warm and inviting, but has an aura of nostalgic yearning about it that is reminiscent of Beach House’s Walk in the Park. Another song, Silvia, seems to reference a poem by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, but its words leave no doubt as to the character’s fate: “The water is your friend / And down and down and down you go.” In my view, the most exhilarating song is Bird On Your Grave, which begins slowly and wistfully, before rising to the surface with an electric guitar solo similar in tone and eccentricity to the one in Sufjan Stevens’ Sister. It’s a sad fact of life that Marissa Nadler will probably never be as well known as the acts on the Billboard Hot 100, but to anyone who cares deeply about art and beauty, her music will be infinitely more gratifying, and longer-lasting too.

Bryter Layter (Album Review)

 

In an age which prizes personality over introspection, and made-for-radio blandness over genuine feeling, it is always thrilling to discover musicians with loftier ideals. The English folk musician, Nick Drake, is a case in point: despite never experiencing commercial success in the tragically brief twenty-years he was living among us – Nick died in 1974 from an overdose of antidepressants; can there be a more depressing cause of death? – he is the man behind three of the best albums of the last century. Ironically, however, due to his timidity and withdrawnness, which put him off playing gigs, he only gained any real recognition after his song Pink Moon featured in a 1990 Volkswagen commercial, leading to his first listing on UK charts in 2004 – four decades after his death!

In any case, if Socrates’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder is true, Nick’s 1970 album Bryter Layter may well be the musical embodiment of human curiosity. As a prim English literature student of Cambridge University, Nick writes lyrics suggestive of a poet at his most cheerful when pondering the kinds of universal, childlike questions that will forever be unanswered. But as he discovers during his spell in the big smoke that is London, reality is not kind to dreamers. “Do you feel like a remnant of something that’s passed?” he sings in an almost calm whisper on Hazey Jane I, expressing a wistful longing for a simpler, more idealised era, the sort of which has eluded doomed romantics since time immemorial. The blissed-out string arrangements accompanying his flawless fingerpicking have a celestial quality that, in being uplifting, clashes with the lyrics’ distinctly melancholy undercurrent; it’s as if the songwriter was aiming for the Empyrean, but had to settle for the eighth floor of a flat building. “For the sound of a busy place / is fine for a pretty face / who knows what a face is for”, he rues on the highlight At the Chime of a City Clock, which, with its warm, golden strings à la Enrico Morricone and a jazzy alto sax in tow, must count as one of the most paradoxically beautiful and life-affirming laments of city life ever recorded. Elsewhere, Fly and Northern Sky elicit the fragile tranquility of that time of day that just precedes dusk.

Nick Drake may never be widely popular, but his penchant for creating meaningful lyrics, complex melodies, and colourful orchestral flourishes – an approach that prefigures Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois – adds up to a record that evokes an idyllic wonderland of rolling green pastures and azure skies. Though some may prefer his other less polished, more stripped-down albums, Bryter Layter finds Nick at his most playful, making it the perfect autumn soundtrack for a Murakami novel or a walk in the park – or even for a study period.