Nina Nastasia - On Leaving

by Adam Anonymous

Nina Nastasia’s timing in releasing this album is either perfect or tragic

"‘On Leaving’, however, is a beautiful collection of painfully pretty paeans twisted to contain just the right amount of sweet harmonies clinging to dark undercurrents of dissatisfaction and gentle loathing."

Nina Nastasia’s timing in releasing this fourth album is, depending on which way you look at it, either perfect or tragic.

Here’s the problem on our part, on paper, anyway. Having barely scraped the mud off our battered trainers after bewilderingly nice folk overload the Green Man Festival, the last thing we need right now is another string-picking acoustic drama from a lady who’s previously underwhelmed where influences and credentials should guarantee greatness. And yet simultaneously this kind of melancholia is suddenly popular beyond most observers’ wildest predictions.

‘On Leaving’, however, is a beautiful collection of painfully pretty paeans twisted to contain just the right amount of sweet harmonies clinging to dark undercurrents of dissatisfaction and gentle loathing. It could without doubt teach plenty of third generation, eighth division English folk revivalists a trick or six.

Elliott Smith becomes a reference point from the length of Nastasia’s songs – mini-masterpieces clocking in around the two-minute mark on multiple occasions – plus the shared downcast mood and New York City transplant status.

The tracks themselves mainly each stand alone as rounded works: ‘Brad Haunts A Party’ quickens the pace but in its defeated “We don’t get around / Like we used to do’ mantra feels strangely pessimistic. The quietly creepy ‘Counting Up Your Bones’, meanwhile, is almost the reverse, taking a songbird voice to seemingly grim subject matter

The crucial factor is a refusal to neglect memorable moments and melodies, something the lion’s share of her previous output lacked. Folk, Americana, whatever, though – the next similar album to cross these ears might get shorter shrift.

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