Nina Nastasia – The Blackened Air

In sixteen short song-poems, Nina Nastasia fixes images of emotional realism as a curator would hang paintings in an exhibit. This is your life. It’s mostly alarmingly ordinary, its dark edges lending substance to your commitment to soldier on through patches of bad weather. If the rainbow is only a dream, you’re still there and not alone. Things will be OK, and probably even fine.

Nastasia’s voice tells this story all by itself, never quite sweet but never breaking. It floats like raw silk, gliding for emphasis from fluid tone to whisper-soft echo. With an assist from producer Steve Albini, her instrumentation flirts with antique country, her songs set in swoops of haunting, Appalachian-twinged violins and bowed saw mixed with vaguely threatening cello and mandolin, and a now poignant, now bright accordion. The overall aesthetic, though, is more post-rock balladry tethered to quirky percussion and strewn with sonic accents.

“In The Graveyard” evokes the vast, dark, ageless woods of grief with a twang to match the pang: “Someone told me I should visit you in the graveyard/But I’m still lonely/And I’m not ready.” The track is the emotional low point of the record, though: Nastasia’s songs generally offer someone nearby to hold onto, even if it’s only yourself.

“This Is What Is” is set to an unwavering heartbeat of a tempo underscoring the lyrical theme to accept that this is how things are and carry on: “This is how it is/I don’t need someone/Take it all/Start again/Use your head/It’s always there.” The stick-with-it sentiment is echoed in the record’s closing and best track, “That’s All There Is”, an alt-country waltz that probably will inspire countless spouses with guitars to pick them up and learn it.