Friday, November 18, 2005 ... 4:37 PM
Haunted Houses: Nina Nastasia's The Blackened Air
It don't twang much, but it's haunted as any dark holler: Nina Nastasia's The Blackened Air, which I discovered a few weeks ago while on the hunt for some autumnal music I hadn't heard before. It's that time of year. Cold, damp and bruised.
She's got two other two records, one on either side of this -- all three produced by the great Steve Albini. I haven't heard the third, and the first, Dogs, is pretty mediocre indie pop. It's not terrible. It's just not that time of year.Here Nina's voice is an abandoned twelve-year-old's going on forty, a bleary-eyed Suzanne Vega, capable of playfulness and an occasional belting, but favoring cool sobriety. Her presence serves the songs, and the songs have a living presence, like haunted houses. They are haunted by fiery devotion, by blunted idealism and the contrails of fast fading youth, by gypsy fiddle and the raspy weeping of a bowed saw.
Consider the adolescent girl's nightmare of "Oh, My Stars", a simple two-phrase tune droned over and over, a jump-rope cadence heard through a fever.
In the den while I sat reading,
I did not see the stranger watching.
My dad chased him down the driveway.
He could have killed him. He wished he'd killed him.
Sirens wailed, floodlights shined in
All the rooms of our house.
Pretty heady psychic brew there, bookended by an image of ice falling from heaven to scatter pigeons. Each of these songs dips into the dark community pool of half-remembered dreams, bad dreams suppressed and daydreams jettisoned. It's a dream about slow entropy in and of the human spirit . It opens with an invocation of feral, cannibal dogs, and closes with an up-all-night waltz about coming to terms with the surrender of big dreams to simply growing older. And, like a character thirty years on from the Springsteen record everyone's strumming air guitar to anew this week, The Blackened Air gives a sincere testimony for steadfast, humble old love in a world that anymore just disappoints us.
We work so hard just to get things done,
Hoping we'll be happier years to come.
I don't know if we'll ever be free like that first year we spent,
But I know I can't live without you.
I still love you.
Acoustic guitars are fingerpicked with hushed urgency, like the spinning of a bobbin. Rock drums bust in suddenly and pummel you just long enough to satisfy the tension. Electric guitars trill along the top, blackbirds on a wire, commenting in trembling sighs or religious tongues. String quartet arrangements reach out to dark ambient spaces around them -- vast but enclosed, as huge and finite as life.
Brendan
0 Comments:
Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"
MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
Faking It
Honey, Where You Been So Long?
whiskey-girl
Porchlight
Charlotte-related
Emily A. Benton
Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events
Evening Muse
Neighborhood Theatre
OTHER THAN MUSIC
Rusty Barnes
Mixed Animal
Cans and Jars
Night Train
Cat and Girl
Tom Drury
Ian Frazier
Film Freak Central
November 9, 2007
Eilen Jewell
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 16, 2007:
Carrie Rodriguez w/ Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 2, 2007:
Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention
***review!***
July 10, 2005:
Chris Scruggs
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
July 8, 2005:
Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
February 19, 2005:
Neko Case and The Sadies w/ Visqueen
Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
***review!***
September 17, 2004:
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings w/ Old Crow Medicine Show
Theater At Lime Kiln, Lexington, VA
***review!***
August 17, 2004:
Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
August 7 & 8, 2004:
Newport Folk Festival
Newport, R.I.
***review!***
July 11, 2004:
Cowboy Junkies
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
Various Artists:
Friends of Old Time Music: the folks arrival 1961-1965 (at HickoryWind.org)
Neko Case:
Live From Austin TX DVD (at HickoryWing.org)
Old Crow Medicine Show:
Big Iron World
Sampson Pittman:
"Highway 61 Blues"
Baby Boy Warren:
"Stop Breakin Down"
Nina Nastasia:
The Blackened Air
Ryan Adams:
Jacksonville City Nights
Robert Wilkins:
"Rolling Stone"
Neko Case:
Furnace Room Lullaby
Etta Baker:
One Dime Blues
Steve Earle:
The Revolution Starts Now
Grey DeLisle:
The Graceful Ghost
