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Marissa Nadler, "The Saga of Mayflower May"
You can keep all your Joanna Newsoms, your Josephine Fosters, yourDiane Clucks, your Mira Billottes and your CocoRosies. I have beenforced to part company with all the other new folk songstresses, asthere is no room in my world now for anyone but Marissa Nadler, whosevoice is so lovely and bewitching that it spins me senseless until Ifind myself wandering aimlessly in a dark wood with no clue how to gethome.Eclipse
Her voice is mysterious and enchanting, whispery and fragile, butalso enunciative and matronly, seductive but elegiac. I can detectshades of Hope Sandoval or Elizabeth Fraser, perhaps, but also darkerstrains of Linda Perhacs or The Trees' Celia Humphries. But just whenyou think that Marissa Nadler's voice is just a gentle, lilting,massaging instrument, there comes a coarse little edge of Anne Briggsand Shirley Colllins, but when you try to grab hold, she has recededfurther into the forest, and her voice echoes off of the canopy oftrees and disappears into the wilderness. The Saga of Mayflower Mayis Ms. Nadler's second album, and it's vaguely conceptual, with eachsong a different chapter in a cloth-bound book of murder ballads, thekind decorated with pressed flowers and handwritten love letters. Thelyrics are a glorious collection of unashamed balladeer cliches, fullof turquoise-colored eyes of lovers, fields of green and skies ofazure, and spoilt maidens silently bleeding to death beneath wildweeping willows, or drowned in rivers by scorned suitors. The fact thather songs play on such familiar lyrical themes works to Ms. Nadler'sadvantage, as it seems she is pulling from some vast collectiveunconscious archive of British and Appalachain folk ballads, whichmakes the emotional impact of the music quite stealthy. I was almostlulled into complacency when "Damsels in the Dark" began, and I wasrudely awakened by its spooky refrain: "Photographs of your face,against the wind/Against the rain, I'm gonna burn them all/And buryyour name." Marissa plays all of the guitars, including 12-string andukelele, and is joined on a few tracks by Brain McTear and Nick Castro,both of Espers and various other related projects. For the most part,Marissa's guitar playing is pretty but unremarkable, little rollingfingerpicked melodies that cycle around and create a foundation for herlovely vocals, which are the real star. There are moments of purehypnotic beauty on this record, when just at the appropriate time,Marissa's vocals are multitracked and overlaid, creating richlyevocative harmonies, a chorus of forest witches answering each lyricwith spine-tingling echoes. What I really respond to in MarissaNadler's music is not its originality, as it is clearly derivative of60s psych-folk, but its lack of pretension and self-consciouskookiness, something that the Joanna Newsoms and Devendra Banharts ofthe world could learn from. I have spun The Saga of Mayflower May more than any other album I've gotten lately, and I'm far from ready to take it out of my player.
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