Nina Nastasia
On Leaving

When in 1999 Nina Nastasia emerged on the American music scene with her debut “Dogs,” she presented a fresh and colloquial style, drawing from the teachings of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Lisa Germano. The subsequent “The Blackened Air” showcased a more mature, harsh, dark, ambitious artist—less verbose and more cryptic—closely akin to her compatriot Shannon Wright, an image confirmed by the third record, perhaps her masterpiece, the most concise and desolate “Run To Ruin.”

Today, seven years after her debut, Nastasia remains that pure talent that we sensed when incredulously handling her first release: the same dramatic and mournful tone, the same enveloping and elegant style.

However, “On Leaving” is a more simple and essential album than the artist's earlier works, more linear and less experimental than its predecessor. A minor album? A transitional record? Perhaps, but a sublime, grand work magnificently balancing between American tradition, folk, and an old-world classicism. Produced by the trusted Steve Albini, of whom Nina has been a sort of protégé since her beginnings, “On Leaving” is above all an acoustic album. Guitar, piano, and an extremely discreet drum set paint the backdrop of each track, occasionally supported by a cello and a viola, capable of both menacing dissonances (“Jim’s Room”) and ethereal, crystal-clear phrases (“Counting Up Your Bones”).

However, the most captivating quality is her vocal timbre, which can be at times confident and gritty like Liz Phair (“One Old Woman”), at times polished and impeccable like Sarah McLachlan (“Our Day Trip”). Stripped of the harmonic and rhythmic eccentricities and the veneer of afflicted and contrite moods that pervaded “Run To Ruin,” the album can nonetheless rely on some songs that are simply immense. “Why Don’t You Stay Home,” a very sweet lullaby that implores care and affection, is composed with a so lyrically feminine attitude that wonderfully combines grace and poetry, while piano and guitar gently cradle the shy melody, and the voice tenderly reaches out to the eternal (“Not much I can think of... We cut down the oak last year”). It's her impeccable fingerpicking and little else that stage the seductive confabulation of “Lee,” just before a Debussy-like piano and strings give the track a solemn, melancholic, highly evocative tone, while the seemingly light nursery rhymes of “Jim’s Room” and “Dumb” hide between the lines distress, fragility, and discomfort (“Dumb I am and a weak one too”). The emotional peak is probably the touching “Settling Song,” a resigned acknowledgment of failure (“I will lay myself down... our innocence lost in the plan”).

The enchanting ending of “If We Go To The West” is no less, a little march that charmingly gets lost in the void, almost devoid of sensations, mischievously adorned by random piano incursions. The album proceeds thus, magnificently flowing, like a stream of consciousness, prepared for meditation, for serene contemplation of one’s achievements and regrets.

And so, as the thirty-four-minute duration comes to an end, and the contours of this fresco gently fade into memory, one finds oneself an orphan of the angelic whisper, of the subtle narration, of the reassuring storytelling style of this artist, perhaps less ambitious than before, but more adult, aware, balanced, worthy, today more than ever, of a prominent place alongside the most gifted singer-songwriters of her generation.