Barcelona's Independent Review Website

Marissa Nadler + Jesse Sykes And The Sweet Hereafter
2008-05-26 Teatre Villaroel Marissa Nadler The Heineken promoted Music Selector has been bringing some awesome and borderline obscure bands to Spain recently. I originally heard of second act of the evening Marissa Nadler due to her being highlighted in Pitchforks list of “bands you will most likely have missed in 2007” for her “Songs III: Bird on the Water” album, as well as charting on their top 50 albums of the year. The album is phenomenal as tipped, but I was unsure what to expect live from such an intensely desolate and personal singer. For someone who, among other melancholic topics, spends a long time singing to dead lovers, the concert is strangely uplifting. Her recognisable reverb-drenched voice is occasionally given even starker effect when required through the use of a second, reverb-drowned, microphone. Ghostlike herself on stage in a long red dress, her hair long and draping and washed in a sea of red light, she may be shy but she is a visually impressive performer. But it’s album standout “Sylvia” that sucked me into her music originally and which I was waiting for all night. However, not to make things simple for herself, she leaves a slower, sadder song till last. Cut from her first album “Fifty Five Falls” shows her as a prospective T.S. Elliot a la “The Wasteland” damning July for it’s long summer days. Whilst reports of her onstage shyness are true, without a single anecdote told throughout the set and only short bursts of some of the sweetest bad Spanish I have witnessed, her music speaks for itself. Her voice is a thing of such exquisite beauty, on songs such as the opening couplet of “Dying Breed” and “Mexican Summer,” and most reminiscent to me of new Kath Bloom or Suzanne Langille. Her lyrics are simple and evocative, expressing sentiments in a classical songwriterish way without sounding passé, “Red is the colour of memory / Blue was the way to green.” To witness someone with such a unique and personal talent is surely one of the most exceptional things about live music and Nadler has this in a multitude. Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter Admittedly I was not very familiar with The Sweet Hereafter other than their link to fellow alt. country band Whiskeytown due to their sharing a guitarist. Though I may have seen their name posted about the net I had never fully got into them and as such it is a difficult task to assess their concert without that niggling feeling that perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt that their recordings offer more than I may give them credit for live. Not a million miles away from the direction Cat Power has been concentrating on with her last few albums, Jesse Sykes sadly lacks the smoothness or power of Chan Marshall’s voice and so the rest of the band’s music suffers. On faster songs such as “LLL” (Like Love Lust) the flaw is less apparent and the powerful crescendo and guitar solo quite energising. It’s not to say that her voice is not pleasant but for me it was irritatingly artificial with an assumed lisp when she sang. I felt that such artifice was a little much, rather a token gesture towards a musical style, much like their name is rather a token gesture towards indie credibility. There are moments of lyrical ingenuity which are quite admirable, Eisenhower’s Moon, demands “tell me what you need to see / Half sadness half fury” and calls up a successful images to define the sentiment. I also really liked the bands between song banter and the back and fore squabbling between Sykes and guitarist Phil Wandscher, especially given the domestic setting of the theatre stage set complete with kitchen sink and fake food. They did draw the biggest crowd and applause of the evening, even forcing the lighting technicians to turn the houselights off again for an unexpected encore, though I’m sorry to say I was already heading out the door.