You're in a canoe, floating down a stream in some backwoods part of the country, and these sounds come seemingly out of nowhere-- a woman's voice; a whispery, corporeal cello; a ghoulish eerie singing saw that strikes matches on your spine. Something twisted, born wrong, is making this music. And damned if it isn't gorgeous.
Nina Nastasia lives in New York City, but she must keep an outhouse and a shotgun in her apartment to dream up such an effective Southern Gothic record. Every sound oozes atmosphere: creepy, bare, sometimes gloomy-- the title of one song, "In the Graveyard," could describe half of them, and the lyrics are rich with references to falling leaves, "little dead dogs," and a stranger that her father once chased from the house. Other songs, hewing closer to country music, feel like a cool breeze through your hair.
Nastasia's arrangements use everything from guitar and drums to accordion, a few strings, and singing saw, and where other albums would treat these as embellishments, they're essential to the strength of The Blackened Air. It's not unlike the bleak first album by fellow New Yorkers Clem Snide-- if you swapped Eef Barzelay with a woman, and if the rest of the band had fathered one another. The instruments float in and out, right from the first track: Nastasia drifts in with her acoustic guitar, and then the full band swells through and vanishes. Vibrant strings drive "This Is What It Is" while the accordion flutters through; on "So Little," a beautiful ambling waltz, instruments come and go like guests at a barbeque-- an aching electric guitar figure, a cello weaving around the last verse.
The spare instrumentation suits the songs, half of which are under two minutes: "The Very Next Day," four lines long, goes by so lightly that you don't notice when it leaves. Diverse but never merely eclectic, it comes together as a patchwork of beautiful fragments hanging in silence: How To Make An American Shroud. As for Nastasia's performance, her voice is not bad, and on some of the songs it fits perfectly-- she really puts her lungs into "In the Graveyard," and on "All For You" her voice is plain and worn like a well loved, hand-me-down housedress. On other songs--"Ugly Face," for instance-- it's just plain. But this lets Nastasia slip into the picture instead of making it center around her: while this might have been a fine singer-songwriter album, Nastasia has turned it into something far more interesting.
But the arrangement and delivery wouldn't be half as effective if The Blackened Air weren't recorded so beautifully, and for that we can thank Steve Albini. That's right, Albini has produced a folk album, and it's one of the most pristine yet organic records I've heard, where every sound is clear enough to touch your nerve endings one by one. Albini holds his own against such purveyors of silence as ECM Records, and this would be a great listen even if songs like "So Little" and "This Is What It Is" weren't excellent in their own right. For all the raucous, brutal records Albini has recorded, this one, in its own way, is scarier than any of them. I keep picturing the cellist as some lumbering figure with three fingers and one nostril. But man, can he play.
