Ballads Of Living And Dying

Hailed as a smoky chanteuse both sultry and captivating, Marissa's songs are mostly mournful dirges and melancholic ballads. Delving into influences of old-timey americana folk, portuguese fado, psychedelia, and country, the songwriting is gripping and unique. Pursuing the persona poem, most of the songs are stories of tragic deaths, forbidden fates, and jilted love affairs, and stormy suicides, as well as some introspective first person songs. In concert, the melodrama is obvious, and each performance is dripping in vaudevillian nostalgia. Marissa's intricate finger-style guitar comes through on six string, twelve string, banjo, ukelele, and autopharp. Her voice is velvety and resonant and soaring with ethereal reverberations. Over the past couple of centuries, the definition of "ballad" has been stretched to include virtually any slow-tempo sentimental song, even on those occasions when it merely means Tommy Lee is coming out from behind his kit to play the piano. But once upon a time the word indicated a more specific, codified form of verse. In the days before widespread literacy, a ballad was a dramatic (frequently tragic) story-poem that functioned as something of an oral newspaper, constructed simply with recurring rhymes so that it could be easily remembered and repeated. And on her captivating debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler does her small part to return balladry to its vivid and illustrious past. On the surface this might not sound like a compelling proposition, but fortunately Nadler has the sort of voice that you'd follow straight to Hades.