Nina Nastasia - On Leaving
Tracklist:
- Jim's Room
- Brad Haunts a Party
- Our Day Trip
- Counting Up Your Bones
- Dumb I Am
- Why Don't You Stay Home
- One Old Woman
- Treehouse Song
- Lee
- Settling Song
- Bird of Cuzco
- If We Go to the West
Nina Nastasia’s latest album, On Leaving, is a meditation on moving, wandering, and homelessness. Perhaps referencing her recent move from Touch & Go to FatCat, Nastasia has also left her characteristically dark, Gothic compositions for straightforward Americana-folk. Yet upon closer inspection, all the markers of her Southern-Goth, twisted-folk allure remain: unsettling vocals, Kate Bush-esque narratives, and spare, echoing arrangements are all at the heart of this concise album.
Nastasia’s voice, while not particularly remarkable, is capable of the kind of expressive depth that sidles right up to her own low-key approach to instrumentation and arrangements. Nastasia’s songs cut straight to the bone, often unnervingly so. While not always perfect, Nastasia’s impeccable timing and phrasing often benefit from her tendency to come in late on the beat. Her world-weary lyrical phrasing addresses the same themes of her narratives: aging, mortality, loneliness, and regret.
Producer Steve Albini once again is in control of engineering, and his step-away approach gives her plenty of space to move around. Though many of the spooky Gothic touches are gone, the spare, chilling effect of Nastasia’s compositions is unchanged. Fittingly, Albini chooses not to overdub Nastasia’s occasionally reedy vocals, and her music retains an organic immediacy that is far more affecting (thanks to Albini, Nastasia’s vocals are even a bit buried in the mix on “Brad Haunts A Party”). The military snare rolls of “Dumb I Am” crackle and snap, and it’s the closest Nastasia comes to epic or inspiring, until she dismantles it again with wordless singing at thirty seconds remaining.
There is no bass here; the result is less cavernous and murky, and much more folky (as in the plaintive, lilting “Our Day Trip” and the teary lullaby “Settling Song”). Yet Nastasia never comes to close to “traditional” folk- there are far too many tweaked-out effects, like “Treehouse Song”’s piano that switches from digressive melodies to rhythmic, mechanical arpeggiations. At five minutes, “Lee” is by far the longest song on On Leaving, and seems the most reminiscent of her older, more compositional work. The tinkling pianos, avoidance of traditional song structure, dissonant strings, distant, thundering drums, and pressure-cooker approach stands up to any of her earlier material.
The eerie strings that infused Run To Ruin (particularly “The Body”) are less pervasive here, but maximized for effect. “Counting Up Your Bones” shifts and changes throughout, but the introduction’s haunting sparseness is just as effective as the creaking, droning one-note string section that saps the space of oxygen later on (much like Run To Ruin’s “We Never Talked”). Nastasia’s most clever songs have lyrics that complement the instrumentation, and the repetition of the phrase “My bones fall in, my bones fall out” mimics the cascade and tumble of her voice. When she sings “I keep you in me where the breath had been,” you can almost hear her exhaling. “Counting” is grounded in Nastasia’s understanding of repetition and gradual dynamic shifts, and yet she still sounds both delicate and fragile.
Similarly, “Why Don’t You Stay Home”’s minimal, delicate beauty of the Renaissance-esque plucked guitar line belies the wrenching story that is being told: the narrator, a jilted, fragile woman, beseeches her wanderlust lover to return home to his growing children. Although the story is common, Nastasia sings certain phrases with an effective enjambment, wrenching thoughts and sentences apart, pausing at the most awkward of moments. The passing of time is emphasized (“We cut down the oak/ Last year”); the repetitious cycle of his actions takes a physical and emotional toll on her (“But why do you run/ And run”).
Her songs occupy a much smaller space- this time, a bedroom instead of a wide field- and as a result On Leaving is more effectively rendered through headphones than a stereo. Though the negative space still defines the push-and-pull tension of her songs (“Bird of Cuzco”), it seems as though Nastasia’s presence has shrunk. Almost engulfed by the surrounding space, Nastasia’s voice just sounds smaller (opening track “Jim’s Room”).
Yet the album’s centerpiece, and one of Nastasia’s strongest, most stirring songs to date, is “One Old Woman,” which successfully reclaims that space as her own. Everything about the song is classic Nastasia: Albini’s sharply processed acoustic guitars, Nastasia’s clay-baked voice, and confessional lyrics.
“One Old Woman” shows Nastasia in total control of her voice. The dynamics of her vocals shift frequently and suddenly, mirroring the conflicted state of the narrator. At first loud and defiant (“But I know I’m not allowed”), Nastasia is quickly sapped of volume and strength, in a decrescendo (“To hold on too tightly to what has gone.”). Even the pacing of her singing and vocal phrasing speeds up and slows down according to the volume of her voice. The subtle dynamic shifts in a line like “If I don’t take charge, then I’ll disappear” lend Nastasia’s story a powerful believability and 3-D sonic landscape. The perfectly spare, brushing snares, crashing cymbals, tickling piano melody and acoustic guitar gently nudges the song into blissful perfection.
At only thirty-three minutes, On Leaving has little fat to skim. There are no tricks, no smoke and mirrors, and Nastasia smartly plays up her strengths. Lyrics, although frequently cryptic, mostly avoid metaphor and coy language, relying instead on pointed observations and the directness and immediacy of everyday events. On Leaving occupies an alternate universe of fleeing husbands, faded memories, lost innocence, and the claustrophobia of small-town existence. Though Nastasia typically writes about the domestic, the music itself has an otherworldliness that gently floats in a delicate, opalescent bubble. On Leaving may seem a bit lightweight upon first listen, but five (or twenty) listens will unearth a trove of Nastasia’s characteristic musical and lyrical tics.
MP3:
Why Don’t You Stay Home
One Old Woman
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