The Morning After: Little Hells by Marissa Nadler

Little Hells was released March 3 on Kemado

Report Card: B

Marissa Nadler’s built a nice little scaffolding of critical acclaim from her last couple albums, and during this time she’s admirably filled the gap between the likes of Josephine Foster and Joanna Newsom on the ethereal side, and St. Vincent and Feist on the populist side. Her airy, controlled approach is on display once again with Little Hells, the excellently titled follow-up to 2007’s Songs III: Bird on the Water. And if it seems like Nadler’s been coming out with albums at a ferocious pace, you’d be right—this is her third in four years, and never before has her career seemed so poised for a breakthrough into that most fantastic of sub-major laudations: widespread blog-love.

The big question about Nadler has always been whether there’s enough differentiation between songs to withstand the storm of multiple listens, or even of the LP form itself. Nadler’s voice is gorgeous in the way that Neko Case’s voice is gorgeous, but it’s this greatest strength that doubles as her greatest weakness: lulling the listener into an early sleep. Nadler employs boatloads of reverb to enhance the impression that she’s singing from the watery bottom of the world’s deepest well, and on Little Hells the potential shortcomings of her most notable instrument are as apparent as ever; here, the languidness of her voice sometimes suffocates the album altogether. Because Nadler rarely displays fragility or even the full breadth of her possible range, at times it seems as if she’s afraid to show her humanness, or the cracks in her image of the ideal, dreamy vocal. As a result of this protection, her songs sometimes hang together on a line that is almost too flawless to sustain interest.

With that looming as the big picture issue, and plaguing Little Hells (which may in fact be her most complete work yet), Nadler is left best suited as the writer of a few exceptional singles. “River of Dirt” is a wonderful track built upon a propulsive interlocking rhythm, “Loner” is a medicated trip through space, album-closer “Mistress” is an anthemic take on saying farewell to suffering, and “Ghosts and Lovers” seems fit for any number of compellingly dreary mixtapes. But while these songs in isolation showcase Nadler’s force as a songwriter, on the album they blur into the background, washed away like so many in the reverb-soaked swamp Nadler calls home.