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Feb 18, 2022 Web Exclusive By Hayden Merrick

Marissa Nadler has a gift for extracting optimism from unlikely, morbid places. Barely six months ago she released her accomplished tenth album, The Path of the Clouds, which was partly motivated by the disappearances examined in her lockdown TV vice, Unsolved Mysteries. Nadler doesn’t fear the worst for these missing women but believes they chose to sneak away from irretrievable situations in order to seize a second shot at life.

This theme of rebirth spills over to her new EP, The Wrath of the Clouds. In many ways an extension of its full-length predecessor, this five-song collection—three originals and two covers—still stands of its own accord. Wrath opens with “Guns on the Sundeck,” an eldritch eulogy to the RMS Queen Mary, a 1930s ocean liner-turned hotel/museum that now idles in the port of Long Beach, CA. Nadler embodies the supposedly haunted keel while a solitary guitar laps at her vocals, light like the sea air—“‘I miss the ocean,’ she said/‘It’s nice in the sun but I need a break from the dead people.’”

Nadler’s mysterious and gothic persona casts her as an elusive figure—cold and colorless (see her Instagram) like her compositions. Yet empathy and lucidity define her lyrics. “Some Secret Existence” is concerned with the disappearance of Dorothy Caylor, an agoraphobic woman who went missing in 1985. “Did she get on that train?” Nadler repeats, hypnotized by the question mark clouding Dottie’s fate. Her guitar joins the rumination, cycling a five-note motif—“Dottie’s Theme,” perhaps—while splashes of reverb ripple outwards and dissipate. An occasional misplaced note and wayward string buzz further feed this uncertainty—the imperfection of the unknown—and create something raw yet celestial.

Like her muse Cat Power, Nadler deconstructs her cover songs—“Saunders Ferry Lane” by ’70s country pop star Sammi Smith, and the only major key song on the EP, The Alessi Brothers’ “Seabird”—and reassembles them into something recognizable but forever changed. It’s like trapping a moment in a photo, resituating it alongside others in a collage, and thereby altering its meaning, and perhaps its future. She does the same with the women in Unsolved Mysteries, obsessed with the idea of people living the life they want to live. By doing this herself—writing deliberately, chiefly for herself—she’s able to extend her solicitous voice to those who cannot speak for themselves. (www.marissanadler.com)

Author rating: 7/10