In truth, several Nina Nastasia albums for this list of the decade’s most overlooked albums. Her 2002 breakthrough The Blackened Air is probably her most beloved, definitive album, a lovely collection of southern gothic folk, but my vote just narrowly goes to that album’s quickie follow-up, 2003’s Run To Ruin, an eight-song, 31-minute folk-noir novella. Where The Blackened Air hinted at a dark side, its cellos, violins and accordions occasionally threatening to rise up against Nastasia’s eloquent songs, Run to Ruin is purged of all lightness altogether.
It’s Nastasia’s most thematically cohesive album, playing like a short mystery story, albeit a very vague one. “We never talk about the things we witnessed,” Nastasia sings on the album's opening line, and she keeps that promise, dancing around the trauma she’s trying to repress. The song titles sometimes say more than the actual lyrics: “I Say That I Will Go,” “Regrets,” “You, Her and Me” and “The Body” all suggest a nightmarish, scarring encounter that would explain why Nastasia sounds so broken and defeated. As on The Blackened Air, her instruments conspire against her, but this time she doesn’t have the strength to fight them back. They run wild over these songs, creaking and screeching and hissing to the uneasy drumming of The Dirty Three’s Jim White.
Run to Ruin was Nastasia’s darkest hour. On subsequent album’s she’d return to sparser, gentler material, as if a great weight had been lifted off of her soldiers.
