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.

Slowdive – Souvlaki (Album review)

Reviewers have never been short of confidence. It takes some temerity to believe, after all, that what you write will have any influence on a reader’s taste in books and music. Or at the very least, there’s that warm feeling you get from seeing your work published in a magazine – which you can then brag about on your CV. But with power comes responsibility; and so when reviewers take it upon themselves to write a bad review about an upcoming band, the consequences can be unforgiving. This was certainly what happened in the early 90s, when bands connected with a new London-based underground scene faced the wrath of music critics writing for influential magazines like NME and Melody Maker.

And probably no band had it worse than Slowdive. Slowdive belonged to shoegaze, a genre of music so-called because the shy musicians pioneering the genre would seemingly gaze at their shoes while performing on stage. In truth, however, shoegaze musicians were looking not so much at their shoes as they were at their guitar pedals, for the genre, characterised by noisy, distorted guitars, subdued vocals, and introspective lyrics, made full use of effects. Slowdive were a typical shoegaze band in these particulars, and in 1993 they released their second album, Souvlaki, which is widely considered the second best shoegaze album of all time, after My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

And boy, is Souvlaki a work of art. The album opens with Alison, where Neil Halstead, whose mellow vocals contend with swirling guitars, sounds like he’s drifting into a black hole. Indeed, upon listening to the album it is difficult not to contemplate space, for the gentle, dreamlike guitar playing resembles nothing particularly terrestrial. The second song, Machine Gun, is arguably even more spaced-out, as the angelic voice of Rachel Goswell makes the idea of drowning seem rather beautiful: “Just the weight of the water drags me down, again”. Of course the drowning is a metaphor for the sense of helplessness that accompanied Halstead and Goswell after they broke up just moments before they began making the album.

The idea that artists produce their best work in times of distress could not be more apt here, for the album is tinged with an unspeakable melancholy. But melancholy does not a dull album make; on the contrary, much of Souvlaki is energetic and uplifting. Souvlaki Space Station – a subtle piece of humour, if ever there was one – elicits the image of flying a Millenium Falcon through space at warp speed. The song’s ending is also notable: the distorted guitar that closes the song may have inspired Radiohead, for their song Karma Police creates a similar noise. Elsewhere, the opening chords of When the Sun Hits evoke a Beethovenian nightmare, if such a thing existed. Not long into the song, the chorus hits the listener at full strength, evoking very much what it would sound like to throw caution to the wind by riding a comet into the sun. Try listening to the song without getting goosebumps, I dare you; you’ll fail.

The rest of the album is more laidback, being something like a cross between country folk and noise rock. So When Slowdive closes with the forlorn Dagger, there is no mistaking the pain that love hath wrought:

The world is full of noises
I hear it all the time
You know I am your dagger
You know I am your world

Despite the brilliance of their album, Slowdive never received great critical or commercial success, eventually leading their label, the famous Creation Records, to drop them in favour of an upcoming Manchester band called Oasis. But moving forwards twenty-one years, Slowdive remains a delight to anyone lucky enough to discover them.