Life and loss have a way of forcing perspectives on you. While it is good practice as a decent human to seek perspectives outside of yourself, there is also a long prevailing attitude in the zeitgeist that you are the only one who matters. This cannot be, and it often takes heartbreak, loss, tragedy, or particularly sharp comedy to shift people’s focus from themselves to someone else’s viewpoint. Another shift in perspective comes from trying to look at a situation from the outside. Remove yourself from the situation. Be a fly on the wall. Reach great heights in the atmosphere and beyond in order to assess the situation, to grasp the scale of what you are feeling and how it impacts the space around you, or how little that space and the universe care. Different perspectives can get existential, but can help provide closure and understanding of different parts of life. For Marissa Nadler, on her tenth full-length solo album, New Radiations, she seeks the bird’s eye view of lost love, weaving stories of heartbreak into physical and surreal perspectives.
A veteran of the world of dark folk and gothic Americana, Marissa Nadler‘s distinct falsetto, often adrift in reverb, carries the kind of ethereal longing of some other worldly spirit, but in folk music tradition, her songs are deeply human. Throughout her career, Nadler’s music has carried the gentle finger picking of folk-song balladry while gradually introducing deeper sonic textures, that occasionally overwhelm the acoustic guitar with swells of strings, synthesizers, distorted guitars, and low drones. The effect becomes hypnotic at high volumes, earning her plenty of fans from the heavier side of the music spectrum, working with Cave In/Mutoid Man guitarist and vocalist Stephen Brodsky on the album Droneflower, as well as collaborating with Xasthur, Mercury Rev, and The Kronos Quartet among many other songwriters and musicians of dreamy and dark music.
On New Radiations, Nadler seems to have dialed back some of the more punchy and grandiose musical textures from 2021’s The Path of Clouds. There are no drums on this record, the only percussive sounds coming from each pluck of her guitar stings, almost always plucked instead of strummed. This creates an even more atmospheric feel to these songs, like the whole album that follows The Path Of Clouds is indeed trails of water vapor floating around you. “Bad Dreams Summertime” does have strummed chords that provide a backbone for reverb-soaked vocals, electric guitars, slide guitars, and more to envelop you in a hazy Twin Peaks shoreline as her physical and emotional world’s crumble.
This is the second track on the album, following the enchanting “It Hits Harder” that sees the narrator flying in a Cassna around the world, trying to forget her lover. The forces of nature make her turn around, ‘It hits harder, from up here,’ she sings in defeat, drawing the second verse back to ground zero where the goodbyes came from. This song sets the narrative theme of the album. Though this isn’t a concept album, the recurring themes of loss and elevated perspectives are hard to ignore. The final three tracks of New Radiations are firmly above ground. “Weightless Above The Water” is a psychedelic escape from a tormented world. “To Be The Moon King” sees model rockets and becoming one with the moon as an escape from death, and the achingly beautiful closing track, “Sad Satellite” returns the love-scorned narrator to a height that can travel space and time to say goodnight to her lost love.
The rest of the album concerns other relationships. Looking at ex-lovers as they enter new relationships on “You Called Her Camellia,” “Smoke Screen Selene,” and “Light Years” she narrates regrets and empathy through stages of loss and stagnation. “New Radiations” brings the relationship of technology and memory into light. ‘Tried to break the glass tile, the ending of the scene,’ she sings before, ‘psychic sensations, new radiations, have taken their toll on me/I was retracing the lines of a memory.’ “Hatchet Man,” meanwhile narrates a grim tale of wanting to love a murderer, whether literal or metaphorical, she sings, ‘I was in over my head/I couldn’t make him love me, only would have been better just to live with loneliness, than all of this.’
New Radiations is a haunting and beautiful album, that no matter what your take aways are, seems to float with ease and grace in the shadowing memories of dreams slipping from view. The depth of sound may borderline drone metal, at times, but this heavy ambiance doesn’t detract from the album’s luster, whisps of thread connecting hearts and minds with all of the tension of the tumult of love. Nadler isn’t breaking new ground with New Radiations, but she doesn’t seem interested in the ground at all. Her music and voice soar too high above such trite geographies, and in doing so, Marissa Nadler has blessed us all, once more.
