Nina Nastasia / A Collection

Nina Nastasia

The beautiful, haunting sounds of Nina Nastasia seems like an appropriate post on this cold gloomy day (where I am). With the growing number of "singer-songwriters" arriving into a crowded a genre, it's a joy to hear the ones that truly standout. With fans like John Peel and Steve Albini, you know there's something special in her sound. Enjoy this collection of Nina's recordings and please support the artist!

Nina Nastasia / Dogs
Released 2000

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Nina Nastasia's first outing is a captivating, melancholic affair of precision and emotional clamor and stands as a fantastic sibling to her essential sophomore album, The Blackened Air. Dogs has a calming atmosphere, occasionally flirting with dissonance, and stands as a remarkable work of minimal building by repetition to support Nastasia's pitch-perfect voice. It is a rare group who can pull off such a fluid shift from composed sophistication to raw, dangerous, and sinister energy and not only continue to be engaging, but make ascending demands so confidently as to require full attention for the span of 40 minutes without interruption. Hypnotic, luscious, and timeless, Dogs is an album whose freshness and immediacy will never falter. - Gregory McIntosh, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / The Blackened Air
Released 2002

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Just how beautiful is The Blackened Air? Remarkably beautiful, though it's far from a smooth train ride through the rustic southern town where it seemingly takes place. Chunks of falling ice nearly take the lives of pigeons, peeping Toms leer outside windows, communication between two lovers breaks down, and the days pass by slowly, only to repeat themselves over and over and over again. The clouds look more like coal than cotton, and one of the protagonists is capable of drowning the town's people in her tears. Backed by a skilled cast of musicians who take on the standard rock band instrumentation plus bowed saw, accordion, violin, cello, and mandolin, singer/songwriter/guitarist Nina Nastasia spins her lazy, elegantly adorned tales of rural life with a voice that effortlessly slips into your ears. She rarely belts it out, because her lithe voice is perfectly capable of gaining attention when it's just above a whisper. In fact, when her voice is just a little louder than audible, she's at her most powerful. Lines like "I want you...I want you...I want to strike you" fall from her mouth as if she doesn't want to wake the slumbering partner lying next to her, conflicted between lust and dread. This record flows so easily that it sounds as if it made itself. However, engineer Steve Albini should be commended for making this record sound as if it was birthed in a spacious, creaky farmhouse. Intimate, delicate, and laced with greatness, Nastasia's second release is one of those records that only takes one listen to be justly evaluated as special and timeless. The pain is sweet. - Andy Kellman, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / Run to Ruin
Released 06.03.2003

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For those who came to know each syllable and every note of The Blackened Air, Nina Nastasia's third album will take a little getting used to. Released less than a year after its predecessor, Run to Ruin is a much more skeletal and considerably starker album in comparison -- it's also nearly a quarter of an hour shorter in length. Even though the majority of it was recorded in France during the month of June, its lulling tempo, sparse sound, and tangible atmosphere all leave the effect that it was actually made during an extremely hot and humid August afternoon, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Again, Nastasia and her guitar are backed by an assortment of drums, basses, pianos, accordions, violins, cellos, and banjos. Many of the musicians here also played on The Blackened Air; the Dirty Three's Jim White provides the drums instead of Jay Bellerose. While the head count of those involved is great in number, the notes they play are few and crucial. The first four minutes of the "The Body," a quiet but lyrically jarring song, consist only of a nearly silent Nastasia and her delicate guitar. Just after she completes her final line, a violent stirring of strings enters that comes closer to matching the nature of the opening verse's lyrics: "My blood for you, my lover's bruise/My clothes are scattered, my skull is fractured." The empty spaces and brief running time might make the album seem as if it doesn't contain enough substance to absorb. That's not the case. None of these eight songs sound unfinished in the least, and whatever spaces the arrangements leave enable the imagination to play as much of a role as the instrumentation. As for the running time, well, you'll just be more likely to play it from start to finish. - Andy Kellman, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / On Leaving
Released 10.03.2006

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It's been three years since Nina Nastasia released Run to Ruin on Touch & Go. The indie label also re-released her 1999 debut Dogs, making On Leaving her first new recording in three years and her debut on Fat Cat. While Nastasia is well-known for her minimal arrangements and Southern Gothic approach to purging hurt, rage, and disappointment, it was always held in beautifully by her elegantly simple but arresting voice. On Leaving is different. The charts have been stripped back to the very bone here. A piano, a small string section instead of a bass, the acoustic guitar, and Jim White's (Dirty Three) drumming, make for a small, spiny recording that is wrapped in notions of restlessness, passage, travel, change. Memory takes its place at the head of a labyrinthine road beginning with the album's opening track, "In Jim's Room." A single fingerpicked guitar playing an abbreviated chord sequence ushers us in as White's tom toms underscore Nastasia's vocal lines. The viola and cello (arranged by Dylan Willemsa) play shimmering sounds, rather like melodic accents slipping through the lyric: "For a month I wasn't me/A thief would wait for me outside/There were nights I wouldn't let him in..." It's remembering as a cinematic act, slides flashing through, juxtaposing themselves against an undefined present. In "Counting Up Your Bones," her lone guitar picked hesitantly creates a space for Steven Beck's piano, and Nastasia's voice, full of heat, ushers in a love song that reveals the present tense, but it's so far under the derma, it fills the space between derma and blood. "...Your bones glide in/a silent tear, that mingles marrow when you disappear/A dance we weave beneath our skin/I keep you in me where the breath had been..." the guitar gets strummed, the piano becomes a percussion instrument, White's snare pops and the strings support her revelation of a love so utterly close, so completely smashface enmeshed, it sounds like she'll stop at any moment. On Leaving is brief, a mere 33 minutes, but in its sparse presentation where the singer's voice is the chief instrument, it would be almost unbearable to hear any more. Let it be said that this is not mere confessional songwriting. It doesn't fit there; but it does create a new place in the listener, one where lines, a piano chord,a skitter of a brushed snare or a swooping line by a cello or viola, puts you in the singer's world, in her very frame of execution, and it becomes breathless. On Leaving is a deeply poetic record that doesn't need to wrap itself in anger any longer, because genuine sadness has taken its place. But it's not only the songs that set On Leaving apart -- not only from her peers, but from her own catalog as well -- engineered and co-produced by Steve Albini (Nastasia and her partner Kennan Gudjonsson were the other producers) creates a simple clarity and sonic presence so that these elements also become part of the songs themselves. While it's true, those who have followed her brief career have been utterly taken with the searing honesty in her songs, virtually none were prepared for something so utterly and skeletally and hauntingly comely. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / Acoustic BCB Radio Sessions
Recorded 10.20.2006

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A great live radio session recorded at the Bradford Community Broadcasting center. Featuring songs from On Leaving and Dogs, it's a chance to hear an even more intimate Nina Nastasia.

Nina Nastasia and Jim White / You Follow Me
Released 05.28.2007

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What do you get when you add Dirty Three/Tren Brothers drummer Jim White to a Nina Nastasia record? It all depends on what you are expecting to hear, of course. White was part of the spiny little band that accompanied Nastasia on her initial Fat Cat offering On Leaving in 2006. While that record was skeletal, this one is positively minimal, yet in some ways it is also bigger. With only White's syncopated, iconoclastic beatmaking as a foil, Nastasia is challenged to get her songs across with her guitar playing carrying more of the weight. White is not an accompanist here, he is a collaborator, even though he didn't write the songs. In just 31 minutes the pair look into the strange shapes and images that are at the root of her mostly hummable songs and stretch them to the breaking point. Steve Albini recorded the set at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and his trademark is on White's drum sound, full of bassy tom toms and wispy brushwork, even as his bass drum and his rim shots color the end of each line Nastasia sings, and creates breaks in the heart of lyrics to underscore a line or two, offering a portal to the meaning of her sometimes elliptical lyrics, or providing a tunnel into the emotion in a song. Topically, You Follow Me has reflections on family, broken commitments, memory -- bitter and bittersweet -- and death. These are bright and shiny subjects to be sure, but Nastasia's voice emits tenderness no matter what she is singing, creating a sense of equanimity in all of it. Her notions of regret, reverence, anger and fear are all offered matter of factly, yet there is no doubt of her devotion to the truth a song dictates. White gets that vocal instrument, and he does his best to point toward it in every song. - Thom Jurek, All Music GuideNina Nastasia / What She Doesn't Know Single
Released 02.25.2008

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Following 2007's stunning 'You Follow Me' album collaboration with Australian drummer Jim White, Nina Nastasia returns with a brand new 7" single, 'What She Doesn't Know'. Maintaining the pared-back airs of that album, the record features two previously unreleased songs, each showcasing the stunning vocal talents and high quality songwriting that are Nina's hallmark.

Both tracks here were recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, during the time Nina recorded 2006's 'On Leaving' album (her first release for FatCat). As Nina explains, "We recorded a bunch of songs we'd been playing at the time. Some were meant for future records. ['What She Doesn't Know' and 'Your Red Nose'] came from that pile and seemed to be a good complement to 'You Follow Me'." Both tracks featuring on this great AA-side single feature the same stripped-down instrumentation (drums, guitar, vocal) as 'You Follow Me', whilst each was recorded with a different drummer.

Nina Nastasia / Live at the Roundhouse
Recorded 08.13.2008

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This came from the excellent blog: Love Live! Botolegs From Buckleberry. Check it out here!

A great recent recording from Nina that highlights some of her best songs as well as a couple new/unreleased pieces.