All you need to make an album is a girl and a guitar, as Jean-Luc Godard would most likely have said, if he hadn’t been too busy pontificating on the precise number of girls and guns required to make a movie. As ever, I find it hard to disagree with things that Godard never actually said; with this in mind my attention turns to new albums from Nancy Wallace and Marissa Nadler.
First up: Nancy Wallace. Nancy used to be in folk supergroup The Memory Band (past members have included Adem Ilhan and members of Hot Chip), and after flirting with a solo career via a cheeky disco covers EP – Candi Staton and Barry White folked up – has made the break with this new album on Midwich. No fooling around this time, on Old Stories Nancy plays it straight: the only covers are of standards like “I Live Not Where I Love” and “The Drowned Lover” (the album’s highlight; no proper folk album should dare show its weather-beaten old face unless it has at least one song about drowning, I say). Nancy’s sweet voice is so…well, so folk that it could be easily mistaken for pastiche as opposed to the heartfelt contribution to the genre that is clearly intended. Marry that quaint voice to some pure, simple arrangements for guitar and accordion, flavour it with the occasional flourish of strings, and you have a cracking little album that squeezes neatly into that rich lineage without banging elbows with its neighbours.
I’m much more familiar with the work of Marissa Nadler; her spectral Songs III: Bird On The Water was one of my favourite records of 2007 (I think it just missed my Top 20 for the year, but if I was to redo that list, and Crom knows I’ve thought about it, I’m pretty sure it would be Top 5), and her live performances are spellbinding. For Little Hells she has enlisted the help of TVOTR/!!!/Yeah Yeah Yeahs producer Chris Coady, with the inevitable result that the sound has been beefed up a little. “Mary Come Alive” is a galloping clomper with drums, both real and programmed; “River Of Dirt” is better, with a busy krautrock skitter. When you have a voice like Nadler has, an instrument which could break the heart of a sphinx, I’d have been disinclined to bury it under too many layers. When it sits reverb-free atop the simple keyboard parts of the elegiac “Heartpaper Lover” or nestles amongst the neat fingerpicking of “Ghosts and Lovers”, the effect is far more, not less powerful. This quibble aside, the sheer quality of the songs on Little Hells is further evidence that Marissa Nadler should, if there was any justice, be selling bazillions of records.
Old Stories is out now on Midwich; Little Hells on Kemado
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