Marissa Nadler : New Radiations
A challenge any writer worth their salt faces is how to not punish a work for simply not being what you wanted and to judge it on its own merits. Sometimes, however, conditions make that especially difficult. Take, for instance, this album, Marissa Nadler‘s new record New Radiations. There is nothing wrong with a singer/songwriter rooted in Americana and folk performing a stark reduction of their overall sound field back down to the basics, acoustic guitar and vocal and maybe light percussion or yawning violins or the like. Jason Isbell did just that earlier this year, turning in with Foxes in the Snow a document that’s a testament to both the intense solidity of his songwriting as well as the fineness of his pen as lyricist.
The issue with New Radiations being a return to basics in terms of instrumentation and production is that the COVID lockdown years were so fruitful and exciting from Nadler. Her last solo studio record, The Path of the Clouds, and its accompanying companion EP, The Wrath of the Clouds, showcased not just lusher instrumentation but production and arrangement instincts that properly filled in the gaps in her songs. This is on top of a series of fruitful collaborations with Milky Burgess as well as some quite lovely and inventive covers that helped to contextualize a number of influences both expected and unexpected, from Metallica to King Crimson to Townes Van Zandt, filling out space we didn’t even know was left after her previous two covers compilations. Sometimes when writing a tune, you lay out chords and a melody and figure out some harmonic language with the piece really coming to life as you fill in those lines you’ve drawn with the colors in your toolkit. What happens in the wake of this is that on playing New Radiations, it’s hard not to imagine more color.
This isn’t to denounce the material present here. The songs on display on New Radiations, much like one of her earlier career highlights, July, feels time-displaced, the kind of music you should hear from a busted jukebox in some dusty bar filled with old country and folk songs you don’t remember from the ’50s and ’60s, drifting along some imaginary and half-hallucinated heathaze rippling highway heading west to nothing. This is hauntological music, operating within the context of gothic folk in much the same way vaporwave did for electronic music, recalling a version of history that never existed but does exist within the halls of the head, like drowned shopping mall staircases coated in white tile and mirrors and dying neon lights. Here, the atmosphere is duskier, white like the cover but also white like Bowie in the late ’70s or Velvet Underground in the depths of their heroin stupors and genius songwriting. It’s impeccable mood music and, kept either at a proper distance or held tight against the heart, it does its job quite capably. This, admittedly, is to be expected from Nadler; at this stage in her career with this many songs under her belt, it would be very strange for her to put out something bad.
Hence what I mean about the critical difficulty of taking something for what it is rather than what you think it could or should have been. She’s shown enough sense of color across her career, especially recently, that it becomes so, so easy to imagine these songs sparkling with the warm and deep bass of classic Cure and the way those synthesizers on old goth records seemed to almost roar. It isn’t here. What is are emaciated and fragile songs, clearly fragile on purpose, generating that decaying shellac and silver nitrate sensibility, like the songs might shatter if held wrong. My concern is that this is well-trod ground for Nadler, even if it is a space in which she clearly is very capable. That said, this material makes comfortable peers with those earlier records of hers more devoted to this style.
Label: Sacred Bones
Year: 2025
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