It has been said that she has a voice that is in a mythological era, could have lured men into the swamp out to the sea. Maybe it is the kind of fantasies about sudden death that makes Boston-Marissa Nadler also found the cooperation in the black metal realm. A genre that has in recent times shown increasing interest for the gothic minded singer/songwriters in general. The voice is both seductive and enticing. Against a backdrop of the more grand events she would be mistaken for Lana Del Rey. Not least in songs like ”Firecrackers” and ”Blue vapour”.
But the Nadlers dreamy muted shades of gray revolves rather around the fingerplockad folk music with a thick layer of cobwebs. As if the Addams Family abandoned its victorian old castle and moved into ”Little house on the prairie”. You can call it dark americana or country noir. Others have spoken about ”Narco-folk”, and Nadler himself has said, I have to wonder if it refers to narcotic or narkoleptisk. Without such terms, we can say that her haunted sound has both hypnotic and soporific qualities which are really to be more suitable for a venue with a seated audience.
” she says, and calls a small, but dedicated crowd to come closer. On Nalen’s smallest club scene switches her between six – and tolvsträngad electric guitar, repeated in layer upon layer with the help of samplingspedaler. She has just learned loop for this tour, which explains the tentative appearance. It shows rarely during the actual songs, but the bashfulness and ursäktandet become troublesome in the long run.
She asks the photographer to stop shoot and question their own skills so many times that it eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when she becomes entangled and must start in the concert’s final two songs before the encore. Then she sends her home audience with Leonard Cohen cover ”Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye” on acoustic guitar – because she assumes that it is what people expect. But no, for an artist with eight solo albums, it is actually no way to say goodbye.
Read more music reviews by Johanna Paulsson, for example, if Beth Gibbons makes Góreckis breaking’m symphony relevant.
