Strangers is an astounding combination of styles that takes music that is fairly usual, and turns it into something completely unique that strikes slowly but deeply, and irrevocably.
Strangers is a culmination of years of work, moving past heartbreak and embracing maturity as growth rather than deterioration.
Strangers feels and sounds like a breakthrough album, a set of linked short stories set to music.
Singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler delivers her strongest set of songs yet on Strangers.
Nadler has moved forward with a delicate yet steel-spined album of intimate soliloquies positing her as having taken up the baton which Mazzy Star have so often dropped.
An album that seems to exist in some hinterland between dream, nightmare and reality.
On Strangers, Nadler seems to have her perfected her craft, adding even more confidence to keep her winning streak alive and well.
She’s the sort of artist that you couldn’t imagine ever making a bad album, and her newest is more proof.
Strangers is in many ways more dynamic than some of Nadler’s previous efforts, balancing the ethereal atmospherics with musical movement that adds a sense of foreboding, as if Nadler were singing calmly in the face of an onrushing apocalypse.
Despite the ominous lyrical content, Nadler creates music with warmth, grace and genuine humility.
Nadler forges ahead on her seventh album, Strangers, with a mix that comfortably sits within her typical sullen-to-sinister range.
Her songs are musically sparse, and while often the first thing I think of is Grouper in comparison, Marissa Nadler’s songs are much more potent; patently bleaker; downright apocalyptic.
For the most part Strangers succeeds because of its strangeness, but when that strangeness slips, the album as a whole does too.
Where Marissa Nadler missed the mark by stripping away both the darkness and the interesting musical experiments of its predecessor Little Hells, Strangers fills the space left by doom and gloom with heady sonic experimentation.
Atmosphere is everything in Nadler's oeuvre. The dynamics of her songs and their careful arrangements are sketched with subtlety: there are few 'big' moments. With that in mind, it's the beefier, fuller tunes that stand out.
The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.
It took me weeks to finish listening to this record lol
'Strangers' has a lot of gorgeous 'dream folk' cuts, however it struggles with lack of diversity in its material, which is the main reason why it took me so long to go through the entire tracklist.
FAVORITE TRACKS: KATIE I KNOW, SKYSCRAPER, STRANGERS, SHADOW SHOW DIANE, DISSOLVE.
A very sweet piece of music. Calming but emotional. I was worried that the same style would get exhausting, however, it kinda stuck the whole way and I didn't get tired.
It took me weeks to finish listening to this record lol
'Strangers' has a lot of gorgeous 'dream folk' cuts, however it struggles with lack of diversity in its material, which is the main reason why it took me so long to go through the entire tracklist.
FAVORITE TRACKS: KATIE I KNOW, SKYSCRAPER, STRANGERS, SHADOW SHOW DIANE, DISSOLVE.
1 | Divers of the Dust 2:44 | 78 |
2 | Katie I Know 5:46 | 77 |
3 | Skyscraper 4:07 | 70 |
4 | Hungry Is the Ghost 6:16 | 70 |
5 | All the Colors of the Dark 4:13 | 78 |
6 | Strangers 4:12 | 70 |
7 | Janie in Love 5:02 | 79 |
8 | Waking 2:38 | 61 |
9 | Shadow Show Diane 3:16 | 60 |
10 | Nothing Feels the Same 3:14 | 68 |
11 | Dissolve 3:33 | 58 |
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