tales of love & loss

...Marissa Nadler's music betrays a scholarly appreciation of the most resonant of folk traditions, the death ballad. Ballads of Living and Dying revels in the arcane and gothic, filled as it is with allusions to Poe and songs called ' The Undertaker ' and ' Box of Cedar '. A tad hokey on paper perhaps, but these 10 finely crafted songs are gorgeous in practice. Nadler's tone of faraway melancholy is utterly convincing and, accompanied largely by her own perfumed strums, could be being broadcast from a candlelit nook in Topanga Canyon circa 1971. A benchmark of sorts, for the new psyche folk underground.'

It has been an effulgent year in the musical catacombs, and one gem shines brighter than most: 23 year old singer/songwriter and painter Marissa Nadler. Born somewhere between the Renaissance and the turn of the century, she possesses the kind of seductive, velvety soprano that instantly burrows its way into the heart and soul. Doused in a wash of reverb, and backed with acoustic guitar, banjo, organ and more, the voice relays tales of fading beauty queens and sad souls lost in the shadows of introspection in a style that's informed of old Americana and older English, but run through a post psychedelic prism

...[She] infuses warmth into her dark ballads and sylvan shanties. (That and she handles her own guitar, ukelele, five-string banjo, organ, etc.) On her lovely debut, last year's Ballads of Living and Dying, Nadler avoids a pretentious chill even when retooling Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee" or submerging herself in the drowning death of Virginia Woolfe. With the Saga of Mayflower May, the literary references aren't as obvious (the songs follow her alter ego, Mayflower May, through various quests), but Nadler's erudite melancholy and knack for wraith-like melody is even more distinctive. (Think of Neko Case swarthed in black). Despite her dusky aesthetic, she fills the songs with color: the almost upbeat strumming of "Yellow Lights" finds the protagonist "drinking rubies in the rain," while the narrator issues the warning, "Oh, Mary, don't you die/"Cause of the color of her eyes." Ominous closer, "Horses and Their Kin," complete with ghostly choir, talks of silver trees and a yellow moon amid a raging fire. There's freak folk or new-weird whatever, and then there's Nadler's gothic tinged folklore and crystalline choruses, which could've been penned centuries ago by Poe's lost maidens in crumbling mansions. Or, judging from Nadler's cover photo, perhaps Ophelia is a better fit.

I have been forced to part company with all the other new folk songstresses, as there is no room in my world now for anyone but Marissa Nadler, whose voice is so lovely and bewitching that it spins me senseless until I find myself wandering aimlessly in a dark wood with no clue how to get home. Her voice is mysterious and enchanting, whispery and fragile, but also enunciative and matronly, seductive but elegiac. I can detect shades of Hope Sandoval or Elizabeth Fraser, perhaps, but also darker strains of Linda Perhacs or The Trees' Celia Humphries. But just when you think that Marissa Nadler's voice is just a gentle, lilting, massaging instrument, there comes a coarse little edge of Anne Briggs and Shirley Colllins, but when you try to grab hold, she has receded further into the forest, and her voice echoes off of the canopy of trees and disappears into the wilderness.

http://rapidshare.com/files/3195134/MarissaNadler.zip