nastasia ftw

Nina Nastasia might be my favourite female singer-songwriter eva, which is saying a lot (too much?), but there’s something here that isn’t exactly like anything else.  Above all, she’s really great at “characterizing” her songs.  They always “sound” like what she’s singing about, and create an elegantly cast world for the song to exist in.  And the characters she speaks for, or speaks as, are richer for the subtleties of her delivery — sighs, trailing syllables, dropped melodies.  She’s not really that great of a singer, but she makes up for it in the impression she puts on each word she sings or speaks.  She understands, above all, that her songs are like stories, and that stories are best told with feeling and immediacy.

The above song is the first track from her new 2010 release, called Outlaster, which has a kind of cover that reminds me of Beetlejuice (the cartoon, I think).  The album isn’t out yet; there’s a scene rip floating around but I’m just waiting for the official release to get something with a bit better quality.  I have high hopes, though.

The line that gets to me the most here (and there’s always at least one in each of her songs) is the one about the “sixth grade picture.”

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I have two music reviews worth sharing, and both come from Coke Machine Glow, from the same posting date.  They’re not really important for the specifics of the album they’re reviewing, but rather for what they’re saying about the broader picture of what it is they’re talking about.

This one concerns Broken Social Scene’s Forgiveness Rock Record.  And despite it being classic CMG in its seemingly reactionary/against-the-grain score, it actually offers a lot of food for thought about when a band’s reputation, shtick, cred or “aura” overtakes their actual music, or how that music is interpreted or criticized.  This topic is a bit complex, simply because I think we all listen to music which to some degree makes us “seem cool” or “appear x,” and it’s hard/impossible to separate art from artist or art from culture, but BSS is probably the perfect band to target for this purpose.

I’m on board with the total critical dismissal of BSS’s “political pedantry…reductive Liberal platitudes and flat sloganeering”, and I think, to build on what the writer says about “more is better” in the article, that supergroups are a tough deal.  Now that these guys are all semi-famous with solo careers or in their own bands on Arts & Crafts, it’s no surprise that an album with so many people is going to sound cluttered and directionless.

The second article is about Lucky Soul’s new album, but it’s more about how “the album” is still such a stalwart in the make-or-break of artists’ careers — an (indie) artist is pretty much forced to release a full-length album at some point and the critical success or failure of that album will affect their career irrevocably.  An EP won’t do and singles are out of the question.  So the question is, what happened to the single, and why can’t a band be successful as a singles band?  Why can’t we have an indie-pop singles band, like the Sarah Records bands of yore, or why can’t singles be accepted as full-on artistic statement?   I totally agree, but I think it would be hard for me in particular to break my need for a full-length of worth.  The album’s been entrenched for so long, it tends to make us all think twice about “the end of the album,” which the article also discusses at the start.