The Path of the Clouds By Marissa Nadler
For an independent (and independent-minded) musician, a ninth album might mark nothing more special than the midpoint of a hoped-for lengthy discography. That could be true for Marissa Nadler, but her ninth solo album, The Path of the Clouds, is also a sensuous expansion.
The expansion comes in part from pandemic-related isolation, which nudged her toward learning to play the piano—with help from Midlake’s Jesse Chandler, one of many useful guests on this LP—and toward generating indie-pop textures that elevate her songs between the soil and the stratosphere.
Isolation apparently has also encouraged Nadler to turn her songwriting viewpoints further outward. The first track, “Bessie, Did You Make It?,” makes this simultaneously plain and poetic by opening up the possibility that the kind of woman who ends up dead inside a traditional “Child”-style folk ballad might fiercely seek a way to step outside the narrative, and live.
Nadler’s voice is Bessie’s spirit—ghost and courage—in a darkly confident manner that recalls the women on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1996 album Murder Ballads, along with the fluting, commanding strangeness of St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark and Goldfrapp siren Alison Goldfrapp.
The tuneful variety, which includes the reverent acoustic folk of “From Vapor to Stardust” and the Pink Floydian “Couldn’t Have Done the Killing,” further merits comparisons to Clark and Goldfrapp, plus the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman.
Nadler attracts as much talent as those contemporaries: harpist Mary Lattimore, singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle and Black Mountain’s Amber Webber join Chandler and Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde to keep Nadler aloft.
She’s the one riding the air currents, however, and, because some of those air currents come from her own breath, Nadler never takes The Path of the Clouds so far up that she or the listener cannot inhale.
