At first, Marissa Nadler's Songs III: Bird on the Water doesn't seem especially notable. It's a 12-track breakup album detailing Nadler's pervasive loneliness, her gentle finger-style guitar augmented with cello, percussion, mandolin, synthesizers, and electric guitars. Her voice is remarkable from the outset-- a sad, husky air that climbs to perfect grace notes with ease-- but by the time Nadler sings, "Oh my lonely diamond heart/ It misses you so well," 100 seconds into opener "Diamond Heart", you're pretty sure you've heard this one before.
Not so fast: As Nadler and her gorgeous, incredibly isolated Songs III would have it, there's plenty worth waiting for. Nadler doesn't want empathy for the hurt that caused her to write "Diamond Heart" in a hotel room bathtub in New Jersey or "Bird on Your Grave" for a friend who died mysteriously; she's just trying to ease some of that monumental pain into the next space. And-- though its micro-payoffs may come in the form of a solitary harmony here, a hushed mandolin chord there, or the eerie bells lending a richer atmosphere to the beautiful "Dying Breed"-- such a feeling makes Songs III one of the most focused and engaging singer-songwriter releases so far this year.
Of course, that can be a tough sell for folks accustomed to concentrated emotional whomp. Aside from its presiding atmosphere of pain, little about Songs III feels direct. It peels free in slow, steady layers, Nadler's sorrow ensconced in impressionistic phrases and careful musicianship. As a songwriter, she's still painting relationship trauma in grayscale sadness, occasionally calling on stunning images-- "eyes as deep as brandy wine," "red-painted lips and a jezebel crown," "breaking on the daylight"-- to better realize sullen torment. But that latter layer makes Songs III much more effective than Nadler's 2005 debut, The Saga of Mayflower May.
Nadler's a bandleader now: With acoustic wonderment still in place, she brings most of Philadelphia's Espers to bear here. They augment without distracting, building on her gravitas with quietly breathtaking nuance: A cymbal-scrape pallor from Otto Hauser, or Jesse Sparhawk's weeping mandolin; like Helena Espvall's doubled cello parts smeared over Nadler's "rose-colored dreams" on "Thinking of You", these sounds highlight the words. Even the album's loudest moment, Greg Weeks' piercing electric lead on "Bird on Your Grave", won't wow you from afar, but it will pull you close enough to identify with Nadler's pain.
As a vocalist, Nadler stretches this environment towards infinity: By doubling and tripling her vocals and lacing several distinct interpretations of one melody, she implies that her despair is now as it was then as it always will be. During a splendid, organ-and-guitar take on Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", for instance, the narrator's desolation comes doubled in verses, tripled in the chorus, and chased consistently by the organ. Doom follows her like a rain cloud, it seems, soaking her feelings but powering this, her best set of songs yet. Sure, that's a mundane thing to say about an artist, but on Songs III, it's notable after all.
