Call it either a characteristic of my ADHD, or the path that my journey with music has taken over the years (or both), but my relationship to the music of Nadja is a brief albeit intense one. There was an I want to say four-month long period there in 2010 where I had Skin Turns To Glass on repeat all day after having it recommended to me by a random at a Wolves In The Throne Room gig. And that’s not hyperbole; I would be listening to it on repeat all day. I think the only other albums I gave the time of day at that point of my life were possibly Mastodon‘s Crack The Skye and SUNN O)))‘s Monoliths & Dimensions. I was deeply taken by that record and always intended to dive deeper into the band’s discography but never ended up getting there for one reason or another.
Originally hailing from Canada but now based in Berlin, Najda began life in 2003 as a solo project of the group’s guitarist/vocalist/pianist/woodwind…ist/drummer Aiden Baker, allowing him a platform to experiment with heavy music. He was joined by Leah Buckareff on bass/ vocals/ violin et al in 2005 to allow the group to play live shows, and they have a staggering back-catalogue of 9-ish EPs, over 20 split or collaborative albums, and 24 full-length albums, with this latest entry taking that number up to 25.
And I listened to the one album a bunch.
Look, in my defence… it’s… it’s really fucking good.
Having said that, the prospect of getting back into their music via an upcoming release may just be the opportunity I need to knock my needle into a different one of Nadja‘s grooves. So come with me on a journey to either validate my efforts in branching out into new territory, or affirming my own justification for not trying something new!
Opening track “It’s Cold When You Cut Me” begins the album with an ethereal, minimalist approach and is not fussed on any sense of immediacy; it knows its committed audience has the requisite patience for the journey ahead, and trusts that any newer listeners have enough faith to see where the track goes. Hypnotic percussion, a background wall of bass, and brief pulses of guitar build momentum over the first half of the fifteen-minute track, until vocals weave their way into the mix, accompanied by somewhat discordant horns and layered TV static guitar distortion. While I used the word ‘momentum’ when describing the mood the band craft on this track, a case could be made to replace it with the word ‘tension’, and I feel it’d still be an apt assessment for how I digested the song. Please note – this is not a bad thing, as I don’t mean the kind of tension that leads to anxiety or dread; rather that feeling of standing in knee-deep surf, shivering, as a massive wave rolls inevitably toward you, that sense of bracing yourself as you hold your breath and close your eyes, accepting what is to come, and waiting for the sensation of it to wash over your whole body, dragging you along with it. A solid start, then.
As the turbulence of the end of the first track subsides, it gives way by gliding seamlessly into “Dark, No Knowledge”, and some of the edge of the previous track’s tension comes along with it. After some ghostly female vocalisations, at the 3:25-minute mark, Baker drops those familiar droning guitars that I can’t hear as anything other than Nadja, in a beat I’ve been waiting for since pressing the ‘play’ button nearly twenty minutes ago. A quieter section follows, and all of this is wrapped up in a monolithic earworm of a dirge.
I’ll be honest, “She Ate His Dreams From The Inside & Spat Out The Frozen Fucking Bones” threw me for a second (or several) there, as it begins with a bit of a tonal shift when compared to the two previous tracks. On my first listen to the song, I couldn’t help but feel that, while beautifully tranquil, it felt somewhat out of place here – that is at least until the two-thirds mark, where discordant strings and menacing guitars ramp up and reestablish the tension.
No – as it turns out, the album closer “Omenformation” is the track that most stands out here, wasting no time in launching straight into a feverish, frenetic movement that feels part-industrial, part-blackened doom, yet still tense, just in a more chaotic way. This chaos builds up in the midway point before giving way to what I guess you’d call an industrial/blackened doom funeral dirge, busy guitars hastily building an oppressive wall of sound before your very ears, towering over you and blanketing you in its shadow until the last minute of the track.
While this was a very different experience than I was initially expecting, let’s be honest, both Baker and Buckareff (as both individuals and a collective) and myself are different people now than we were all those years ago when they wrote their sophomore effort/when I went all neurodivergent on it. And while time may still tell for me, it certainly has treated Nadja well, as their songwriting ability feels as focused now as it did fifteen-odd years ago, and cut stands as an atmospherically tense testament to this.
