Marissa Nadler, Carter Tanton (guitar, vox: Tulsa), Jonas Haskins (bass: Earth), Ben McConnell (drums, Brightblack Morning light, Rain Parade, etc.). On record, players include Simone Pace (Blonde Redhead), Farmer Dave Scher (Beachwood Sparks), Myles Baer (Black Hole Infinity), Helena Espval, Orion Rigel Dommisse, Greg Weeks, Jesse Sparhawk
Producers: Chris Coady, Myles Baer, Daniel Daskivich
Sounds Like
"spectral verberations"- The New York Times
"magical" - The UK Sunday Times
"a voice you would follow to straight to Hades" - Pitchfork
"new Marissa Nadler record- Hells Yeah" - Pitchfork
some contacts that you may want:
US press: marissa directly at marissamoon6@hotmail.com
US online press: contact Marissa at marissamoon6@hotmail.com
North American booking/ Japan/ Australia: Lisa O'Hara at High Road Touring - lisao@highroadtouring.com
European and UK booking: Steven at Toutpartout Agency - steven@toutpartout.be
European press inquiries, email Dominic Louth at dominicl@realtimeinfo.co.uk
Press for Little Hells:
4 stars UNCUT
4 stars MOJO
4 stars Q
4.5 stars BUST
4 stars VENUS
PITCHFORK REVIEW: 8.3- by Grayson Currin
The core of Little Hells-- Marissa Nadler's elegiac and elegant fourth album-- is appropriately wedged in the middle: After moving alongside dual Wurlitzers and a theremin throughout opener "Heart Paper Lover", slowly waltzing above a country quartet on "Rosary", and augmenting a dark conversation between a man and his tired wife with industrial-iike programming and synths for "Mary Come Alive", Nadler settles back into her minimal roots for the next four tunes. During those 14 perfect minutes, it's just her voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar, augmented cautiously by piano, organ, and ripples of electronics. Surrounded by little else but her own melancholy, Nadler sums up her career's existential despair: "Ghosts and lovers/ They will haunt you for a while," she sings. And while they do, Little Hells suggests through 10 of Nadler's best songs yet, the sadness will either kill you or keep you going.
Nadler's earlier albums delivered this somberness almost exclusively through songs for acoustic guitar. On those records, her backing musicians seemed intent upon emphasizing the spectral, lost-love tendencies of her words, adding ominous cello shrieks, sinister electric leads, or raggedy lo-fi touches, which found her tagged from the start as a freak-folk artist. As late as her most recent album-- the exquisite breakthrough Songs III: Bird on the Water-- she did little to dispel that categorization, filling the record with archaic language and outsider accompaniment by New England experimentalists like multi-instrumentalist Greg Weeks and cellist Helena Espvall.
At last, Little Hells moves Nadler well beyond easy categories, thanks to a newfound clarity in her words, a compelling link between her songs, and production that sharpens her old strengths wheile brightly exposing new ones. Sonically, her reach is wider and more assured. On "Mary Come Alive", circular drumming, gauzed vocals, and synthetic harmonium suggest the unlikely union of Cocteau Twins and Swans. Meanwhile, "Loner" stacks organ sustains and submerges them beneath Nadler's strum and half-hummed coo. It's like Grouper coming back down the Hill or Valet emerging from the Acid, but more memorable and accessible than both.
But the LP's highlight is still the four-song core that recalls vintage Nadler-- now played, captured, edited, and arranged better than in the past. Her only solo turn here, "Brittle, Crushed & Torn", is crisp and concise, the presentation revealing the strength of the melodies in her bass-heavy picking and the wispy vocals above. "The Whole Is Wide" uses only that voice and Dave Scher's staccato piano march; the simplicity helps the album's most lyrically complex song translate off the page as Nadler intertwines the stories of two women, Sylvia and Laila, who waste their life away in the absence of a man. Nadler swaps first- and third-person pronouns and twists verb tenses, building tension by suggesting that they're both dead or at least headed that way. That time-and-person slipstream is what binds the 10 tracks of Little Hells so well. Nadler mixes images of individuals in various stages of love and loss, often pairing them with imagery of death, decay, and rebirth.
What Nadler's done on Little Hells suggests Antony and the Johnson's work on one of the year's other accomplishments, The Crying Light. Hegarty too alternated between thoughts of giving up, getting out, or fighting back. To do that, he eschewed the guests of I Am a Bird Now, choosing to sing with himself through fascinating harmonies, vocal lines intersecting with one another in unexpected patterns. He also expanded his sound in unexpected directions while refining what he'd always done well-- luxuriously layered arrangements-- through subtlety and tension. Nadler does all of that on Little Hells, and-- like Antony-- she's transcended freak folk as a result.
— Grayson Currin, March 10, 2009
ORDER LINKS FOR LITTLE HELLS:
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"Bleak Bostonian songstress Marissa Nadler has been a very impressive artist for a good few years now, ghosting out from the rafters at regular intervals to deliver installments of the eerie trilogy of albums that began with 2004’s Ballads Of Living And Dying and wrapped up with 2007’s Songs III: Bird On The Water. She's nothing if not singular: her high, frightening trill, Edgar Allen Poe-ish storytelling and textured approach to what you might loosely call folk make for a formidable combination, her songs conjuring exquisite vistas of crumbling splendour and rotted Victoriana. Still, for all their choking beauty, those first three records were more atmospherics wholes than end to end killer songs, intensely evocative, but not exactly visceral.
Little Hells is different. Little Hells is like the bit in Ring when the spooky drowndey girl climbs out of the TV and you realise she's harder than you thought. As in, a lot harder. Where before Nadler's darkened daydreams, dissonant acoustic weaves and elegant turns of phrase drifted somewhat hazily, here they’re concentrated into fuel for the ten best songs she’s ever written, beautiful and merciless as diamond bullets.
"I believe you’re filled with s-s-s-sin," she hisses over 'Loner''s out of control carnival organs, "like me". The antique electronics are something new, but they’ve not idle experimentation; the song's malign whisper in the dark needs something more than the lush drifts of old to back it, and as with near enough every track on Little Hells, Nadler has upped her musical game accordingly. If the solo acoustic shows she played in support of Songs III showed those tracks could survive easily enough without their weirder sonic layers, here lyric, voice and music exist in chilly synthesis. Often guitar is discarded entirely: 'Mary Come Alive' is built on the disorientating sound of a delicate drum machine pattern being stalked by a much louder live figure, while in the centre of the chaos Nadler darkly mutters "I know we had a beautiful life, but things changed"; 'The Hole Is Wide' glides forward on two sad piano notes, the downward spiral of its lonely protagonist – left alone after "the man she loved best... died in a fiery crash" - matched by the ripples of distortion that slowly shred it to nothing over the course of the final minute.
Conversely, she's now not afraid to reign things in where once she’d have over-layered. The title track is a dreamy country strum over which she paints a portrait of a heartbroken recluse (the record's recurrent lyrical theme), guitar adorned by nothing more than a few keys, the hookline a simple, wistfully drawn out "she says"; 'Ghosts And Lovers' is just a quiet arpeggio cradling her searingly sad declaration "ghosts and lovers will haunt you for a while, from the stars and from the sheets and from the ground"; on the woozy 'Mistress' she sounds almost happy, accepting the ultimate outsider role as she lays down into a bendy sea of slide guitar, sighing "it’s strange to end up this way".
In the past it's been all too easy to revel in Marissa Nadler's astonishing voice, roll in the washes of reverb and off key chiming, suck in those eloquently morbid lyrics and be bewitched by the feel of the songs, only without necessarily being walloped by any one individually. Here she’s hacked away the art school whimsy, tossed out the crystals and burned the floaty headscarfs, focussing her talents into ten razor sharp songs, some subtle, some vicious. After years of floating in the ether, Marissa Nadler has finally taken corporeal form. It’s exciting - if a little terrifying - to see what she's going to do with it. "
Stereogum
"Marissa Nadler's fourth album Little Hells is out 3/3 on Kemado. It's her best, most expansive collection to date, mixing her pristine vocals, guitars, and Wurlitzer with a full band that includes Blonde Redhead drummer Simone Pace, multi-instrumentalist Myles Baer (Black Hole Infinity), and Farmer Dave Scher on lapsteel, synths, and piano. You'll get an idea of the expanded palette via "River Of Dirt," which debuts in this week's Drop. Take a listen. "
For US/Canada/Australia/Japan booking contact Lisa O'Hara at High Road Touring by emailing Lisao@highroadtouring.com
For Europe and UK booking contact steven@toutpartout.be
For UK press, contact Nathan at Dog Day Press - nathan@dogdaypress.com or Marissa herself at marissamoon6@hotmail.com
For US press, contact Marissa herself at marissamoon6@hotmail.com
For European press, contact Dominic Louth at dominicl@realtimeinfo.co.uk:
I just wanted to let you know how grateful I am to you. I travel often, and your music has accompanied me all over the East Coast. Thank you for sharing.
oh, by the way, about russian animation, i know you like Hedgehog in the Fog, so check out "Tale of Tales", "Heron&Crane", "Fox&Rabbit" and "Seasons" by Ivanov-Vano they're so nice :)xoxox
The little hedgerow birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression; every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought. -He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten; one to whom Long patience hath such mild composure given That patience now doth seem a thing of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold With envy what the Old Man hardly feels. ~William WordsworthۤI still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them. Like a diet of the mind, I just choose not to indulge certain appetites; like my appetite for patterns; perhaps my appetite to imagine and to dream.
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