Songs III: Bird on the Water plays like a passive flipside to Nick Cave’s aggressive Murder Ballads, with folk songstress Marissa Nadler meditating on being haunted by loss and mortality as fervently, in her way, as Cave waxed about the cathartic pleasures of homicide.
Despite a vocal affectation that distorts vowels at the expense of comprehension, Nadler is an impressive storyteller, using lyrics that mix the modern with the bygone over music that recalls the best of Americana filtered through the mystical atmospheres of British Isle folk.
Comparisons to Neko Case and Hope Sandoval were inevitable but too easy. Nadler has little use for Case’s earthiness or Sandoval’s emotional interiority; her haunting ballads are both more ethereal than the former’s work and more chillingly a matter of fact than that of the latter.
– Lyam White
Marissa Nadler (Kemado Records)