Marissa Nadler - The Sister

For someone whose music often seems rooted in a mysterious past, Marissa Nadler and her place in the music industry is as contemporary a story as can be. Her early releases rightly gained a great deal of critical attention for the otherworldly folk music they contained. But to go from a critical success to wider audience appreciation, one of the demands of the internet age is that you must have an angle or fit into a movement. The internet can make you a star or at least get you noticed rapidly, but rarely does so solely on the quality of your music. The music Nadler was making was beautiful, but perhaps too subtle and layered to thrive in this new world.

Clearly after the 2009 release of Little Hells, her fourth album, Nadler felt she wasn't getting the support she needed and perhaps would have got in the days of record labels being able to creatively invest in great, uncommercial music. Using the internet to her advantage this time, Nadler started her own Box of Cedar record labels, and enlisted the help of fans to record last year's self-titled fifth album. It was a brave thing to do and resulted in an amazing album, with some of her finest songs and arrangements to date. Her new album, The Sister is released this week, and is intended as a companion-piece to that album.

One of the attractions of having your own label is releasing music on your own terms, developing on ideas and creative impulses. The Sister is a heartening release for that reason. Slightly darker and more stark than its companion album, it nevertheless occupies a very similar soundworld, with an emphasis on big choruses and less downbeat lyrical themes than her earlier albums. For the listener, it's a pleasure to hear Nadler exploring further the sonic landscape of her self-titled, and The Sister produces some real moments of greatness in its own right. The sparse opening track 'The Wrecking Ball Company' and 'Love Again, There Is A Fire' show Nadler excelling at anthemic choruses, something her earlier work didn't always attempt. The whole work demonstrates an increased emphasis on traditional, simple songcraft, and nowhere is this better exhibited than on 'Apostle'. By far the strongest track on this collection, it's about as simple a song as Nadler has written, beautifully touching and sentimental.

However good 'Apostle' is as a song, it does however demonstrate one of the chief weaknesses of The Sister. The production and arrangements are so limited, possibly related to the budget, that they don't allow the songs to reach their full potential. There's a case for spare, simple arrangements, particularly given Nadler's beautiful voice and lyrical themes. However, she already has a great many songs with minimal instrumentation, and in this case the production does not benefit the works. They are big, often simple songs and need something extra to make them more distinctive. In the case of some of the songs, it's a matter of great songs not reaching their potential: 'The Apostle' is beautiful but cries out for some variation as the chorus repeats for the third and fourth time. But in the case of some of the others, it's more of a serious problem of not holding the listener's attention. The songs overall are not quite as strong as on the self-titled, and those songs were more richly produced, so as a companion-piece it does suffer in comparison.

It may be a stylistic choice or it may be to do with Nadler's precarious position in needing to self-fund her own releases, but The Sister could have definitely benefited from a full band approach. That's not to say it isn't an enjoyable listen - there are some great tracks here, and Nadler's songcraft combined with her powerful, haunted voice always makes something worth listening to. But as difficult as it will be for her financially, The Sister does demonstrate the need for a fuller approach. She has proven she can do it, on songs like 'Baby I Will Leave You In The Morning' and 'In Your Lair, Bear' from the self-titled record where the arrangements were detailed and impressive. Let's hope she gets the chance or the desire to do it again. As it stands, The Sister, whilst a minor release, is well-worth your attention, but doesn't always do enough to keep the listener engaged.