Nina Nastasia
Nina Nastasia’s debut album, Dogs, charts a girl’s uncertain course from childhood to high school drama and on to the shaky heights and murky dregs of bohemia. It’s a trip plenty of others have taken. From Janis Ian to Liz Phair, the innermost thoughts of young women have been well chronicled, sometimes excruciatingly so. But Nastasia’s record resonates not just within her own little life, within her circle of Manhattan friends, among people of her gender and age. Dogs is a cosmic example of its type, if it has a type at all, for it has something of the pearl in it: a pure form, universally apprehensible but resistant to being pigeonholed. It’s beautiful not by design but as a matter of course.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A record that is both this grand and this humble can’t spring from pet conceits, a new synthesizer, or an unseemly fondness for Rilke. It has to spring from the simplest and most basic reason to play music: a need to communicate. But even that’s not enough: good intentions have yielded so many lousy singer-songwriter confessionals that many of us have run screaming in the other direction, embracing artifice with relief. Women face special obstacles in this area, as female offenders are indulged at times by a pervasive emphasis on sisterhood rather than achievement. For every Joni Mitchell, there are ten Laura Nyros, and for every Laura Nyro, there are a thousand Alanises-in-waiting. Still, even the talented musicians among Lilith Fair participants bob their heads to the alternately maudlin and piercing crap their comrades present as art. Blanket support may have once been necessary to encourage women to express themselves, but the impulse to provide this support has come to preclude thought. Worse, it has created a glut in which a record that actually gets everything right can easily get lost.
Nastasia’s lyrics are artless in the best sense, and her singing is likewise uncontrived. Most of the structures are bedrock simple, though the delicate, minute-long apology “Dear Rose” and the roiling “Underground” in particular are distinctive despite their accessibility. Yet time and again, Nastasia’s approach and the approach of her group transform her material into something more than merely charming. On the page, “Oblivion” reads a bit like a tame cutting from The Bell Jar: “I’m here in oblivion / I don’t feel anything / When it’s time to begin again / I won’t remember anything at all.” Tori Amos might writhe seamily through those lines, making them bit players in one of her doom burlesques. Sarah McLachlan might allow the words to escape only after coloring them gravely, in love with the sound of her own voice. Nastasia just lets go of the lines like she’s carrying on a conversation (the way she sings everything else), but she lifts each half line up, almost hopefully, liking the idea of oblivion more and more, until the final bit (“at all”) brings her back down to earth. In the verse that follows, the song’s cranky undertone is accentuated by what sounds like someone playing piano with a shoe. Cannily.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Leslie Lyons.
