Artist.......: Nina Nastasia
Album........: On Leaving
Label........: Fat Cat
Genre........: Indie
Catnr........: FATCD47
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Aug-16-2006
str.date.....: Sep-11-2006
quality......: VBR/44,1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: n/a
track title time
01. Jim's Room 02:38
02. Brad Haunts A Party 01:56
03. Our Day Trip 01:56
04. Counting Up Your Bones 02:42
05. Dumb I Am 02:01
06. Why Don't You Stay Home 03:30
07. One Old Woman 02:58
08. Treehouse Song 02:17
09. Lee 04:56
10. Settling Song 03:25
11. Bird Of Cuzco 02:48
12. If We Go To The West 02:54
Runtime 34:01 min
Size 41,5 MB
Release Notes:
The hauntingly beautiful new album from Nina
Nastasia arrives perfectly formed and long overdue.
It's been over a year since the reissue of Nina's
debut album, 'Dogs'- a record John Peel called
"astonishing" - and two years since the 'Run To
Ruin' album, which Uncut magazine described as
"Spare, beautiful, outstanding". Nina's fourth
album, 'On Leaving', finds the hugely talented,
NYC-based singer / songwriter signed to a new
label, Fat Cat after three albums released on
Chicago indie, Touch and Go. The move from Touch
and Go implies "nothing scandalous," says Nina,
"just moving, the way you move sometimes. This is a
good move all around."
Nina Nastasia's rare gift of a voice is an
intimate, winged presence that is able to either
freeze or melt your heart, that can powerfully soar
and twist, or brush ultra-gently against you,
suddenly summoning goose bumps. Mojo commented on
its ability to "suck the air out of the room".
Picking over themes of love, longing and loss,
childhood, dreams and human dramas, her beautifully
concise, hook-laden songwriting and the spare
arrangements of her band have a certain gritty,
rustic charm and intensity. Simultaneously tough
and fragile, her songs crackle and smoulder with an
intimate emotional honesty and a dark undertow.
Perhaps witnessing a softening of the
fever-intensity of previous albums, Nina refers to
the new album as being, "more sad than mad".
Excepting the rich and sapient string arrangements
by Dylan Willemsa on Lee and pianist Steven Beck's
sweet classicism on Treehouse Song, 'On Leaving' is
praxis of minimalism that builds on Nina Nastasia's
stunning earlier repertoire, already famously
spare. Here, smoothing bass notes are notably
absent. The lushness of a full string section is
resolved into pure harmonics, evident, for example,
as the smoke in Jim's Room. A piano, the main
accompaniment, often finds chords out of time, the
space left brought to bear upon characters in the
songs, left alone or having themselves departed.
About the players: Nina Nastasia's long-standing
peer relationship with engineer Steve Albini and
musical organizer Kennan Gudjonsson makes its
fourth iteration here, and 'On Leaving' is realised
as well by veteran members of Nina's band, Dylan
Willemsa (viola), Jay Bellerose (drums), Steven
Beck (piano) and Jim White (drums).
The gorgeously delicate cover artwork from 'On
Leaving' was made through a process called
'scherenschnitte', a centuries-old Swiss German
tradition of cutting folded parchment into
intricate illustrations. You might see it hanging
in your grandmother's kitchen: a framed pastoral,
trees and woodland creatures, rustic houses, scenes
of life from a simpler time, cut into lace-like
silhouettes. Nina's partner Kennan approached
distinguished folk artist Marie-Helene Grabman with
a concept for the record design. With what Kennan
calls "surprising intuition", she then cut the
image from a single piece of paper, and the result
forms the centrepiece of the album sleeve. The
artwork is a perfect reflection of the music it
contains, a skillful, elegant balance between
evocative images, and the very spaces that
delineate them.