The Path of the Clouds

Album review

Over nine albums, Boston singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler has fashioned an appealing dichotomy: Gothic and featherweight, light and shade. Her Americana is the stuff of dreams—shapeshifters and ghosts—but also dark reality. "Bessie, Did You Make It?" is a sly murder ballad, the story of newlyweds Glen and Bessie, who disappeared on a canoe trip down the Colorado River: "He dragged his new wife through his treacherous life/ For cheap thrills he took their tomorrows." Accompanied by sweet woodwinds and a gently picked guitar, Nadler sings it like a campfire ghost story, complete with a shock ending. Fifty years later, an old woman claims, "I'm Bessie, I killed him, I was simply surviving." On the Aimee Mann-like title track, Nadler skillfully reimagines the captivating, real-life mystery of D.B. Cooper, a still-unidentified man who, in 1971, hijacked a commercial flight from Seattle then jumped out of the plane with a parachute and $200,000 in ransom money. She tilts the famous story on its side, looking at it as a sort of triumph of transformation: "He flew straight out of the aeroplane ... You're the path of the clouds, then which way the winds blew." When the sleepy guitar fires up a Pink Floyd-style blaze on the bridge, it's like cutting right through clouds. Instrumentation often plays main character roles in Nadler's music. There's the spooky, noir guitar, creeping in like some shadowy dude on the Cocteau Twins-esque "Well Sometimes You Just Can't Stay," and the tambourine rattling like a ghost of the past on "Couldn't Have Done the Killing," even as Nadler assures, "Leave your weapons at the door, you don't need them 'cause I'm not your killer anymore." It's always remarkable to notice how important percussion is in the singer's ethereal world, keeping the songs tethered to the ground. On "If I Could Breathe Underwater," the drums let Nadler's mezzo-soprano and the gossamer touch of harpist Mary Lattimore float without just dissipating into the atmosphere. The verses of "From Vapor to Stardust" feel like a romantic Felice & Boudleaux Bryant melody, and "Elegy"—with harmonies from Black Mountain singer Amber Webber—is as delicate as rippling water, like some old-school Disney fairytale soundtrack. "Seasons change the color/ And the lemon queen it grew/ taller and taller, over you," Nadler sings on closer "Lemon Queen," haunting woodwind hovering like melancholy shadows as steel guitar practically weeps. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz