Marissa Nadler’s For My Crimes.
For My Crimes is Marissa Nadler’s eighth album, and it has the distinct air of being the culmination of everything she’s being circling around for the last decade or so. As such, it feels as much like a greatest hits album as it does a new record. Which makes it the perfect entry point for anyone yet to sample her very distinctive and ample charms.
Marissa Nadler.
Dream folk is the somewhat reductive label sometimes applied to her sound. What you get here on this album is that combination of lush, Gothic-pop, anchored by plaintive, indie country, buoyed by the sound of melodic metal, each of which she’d previously toyed with, individually, on previous albums. But all of which she melds so that they cohere here, on one rounded album.
Or, to put it another way, it’s Sharon Van Etten meets Lana Del Rey via Roy Orbison. Van Etten actually provides guest backing vocals on one of the tracks here, as does Angel Olsen. The title track, which very much sets the tone for the rest of the album, began as a test that her husband set her, to write a lyric in the voice of someone on death row, as Olivia Horn writes in her review on Pitchfork here, where she gives it a respectful 7.2.
Sharon Van Etten in Twin Peaks season 3.
Though clearly autobiographic in the feelings they describe, Nadler’s are songs filtered through the prism of the craft of story telling, in much the same way that those of Nick Cave and Bob Dylan are. As such, they are expressionistic rather than confessional. The result is duskily atmospheric and gloriously cinematic.
You can see the video for Blue Vapor here.
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