Marissa Nadler's New Radiations is Echoes September CD of the Month.
By John Diliberto
Marissa Nadler is not your typical singer-songwriter. Yes, she sings and plays guitar, and that has been the central voice of her music since she began recording in 2004. But she’s darker. Her voice is bathed in reverb, as is her guitar, which she plays fingerstyle, sending symmetries of delay into even more reverb. There’s a reason I’ve dubbed her The Diva of the Downer. That’s not an insult. She exults in reveries from the darker corners of the mind. Afterall, her debut album was titled Ballads of Living and Dying, and her appearance is gothic: with her long dark hair, eyes that are liquid dark pools of sensuality, and her black, Bauhaus-concert attire, she’s like a shorter Morticia Addams.
Nadler has sung with Mercury Rev, Ben Watt, Lushlife, Okkervil River, and with Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins in the group Lost Horizons. She started as something of a folky, but elements of goth, metal, and shoegaze have come into a music that is darkly intimate. Her 10th album, New Radiations, continues that sound, although it’s a little more stripped down than her previous few releases.
“It Hits Harder” is a break-up song using a Cessna airplane flying into the unknown as a metaphor for release. It’s a simple track based on a repeated pattern from Nadler, with electric-guitar accents that sound like a voice of foreboding. As the song moves forward, the electric guitar becomes more pained, with long sustained lines backed by a deep sub-bass synth drone. She makes her pain so beautiful, but it might not be her pain. After all, her last album, The Path of the Clouds, was mostly based on stories from true-crime shows on TV. But this song sounds personal.
Without verbose wordplay, Nadler creates cinematic stories. The title track, “New Radiations,” is a song of being haunted by psychic visions and tragic thoughts of the past—“I was retracing the lines of a memory.” Like many songs on New Radiations, it starts with a simple acoustic guitar riff that makes you think it will be a folk song and quickly moves into a more nuanced and textured direction as sustained fuzz‑guitar chords, arcing electric‑guitar cries, and Mellotron‑esque keyboard lines frame her reverb‑swathed voice.
“Hatchet Man” is a murder ballad that calls back to The Path of the Clouds as she tells the tale of a woman with a murdering boyfriend who “made her watch.” She escapes in the end because, as he said to her, “It could’ve been you.” It’s a murder ballad, but also a metaphor for a toxic relationship.
Space allegories carry through the last three songs on the album. “Weightless Above Water” is another song about leaving it all behind, this time in a spaceship. It’s something of her own “Major Tom.” The space imagery continues in “To Be the Moon King” and “Sad Satellite.” The former is a song about transcending your life, which is what its inspiration, rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, was trying to do. “Sad Satellite” is another song of failed love—trying to go to the stars but only being a sad satellite in someone else’s orbit. Vibrato guitar chords and another sub‑bass growl, all centered on her simple acoustic‑guitar riff, push this song along.
Marissa Nadler takes you to other worlds, but most of them are inside her mind, where her reverbed, disembodied voice speaks of loss, disappointment, and existential fear. All these songs are based around her simple acoustic‑guitar riffs, but it all sounds luxuriously immersive because of the production and arrangements. Nadler’s voice is usually double‑tracked, sometimes more, turning it into a choir. A lot of credit goes to Milky Burgess: he did all the arrangements, and his electric guitar and synths are all over this record in deceptively understated ways, even when he hits a power chord to accent the tension.
Marissa Nadler’s New Radiations is an album that stands in the face of so much commercial singer‑songwriter and pop recordings. It’s Nadler stripped bare, yet enveloped by a world of her creation.