Nina Nastasia - The Blackened Air

A very welcome clear vinyl repress of On The Blackened Air, Nina Nastasia's excellent second album, originally released in 2002. Hopefully we will see a repress of her follow up - Run To Ruin.

Alt-country was at its height of popularity during the late '90's and early 2000's, and this album, originally released in 2002, is an outstanding example.Nina Nastasia and her band are not content to just support a vocal melody; they pry it apart and look down it's throat, with guitars and mandolin, bowed saw, raggedy fiddle, cello drones and clattering drums accompanying her heartfelt melancholic vocals.

It stretches one's mind to know that these songs were composed and rehearsed in Nastasia's small NY apartment, because they sound like tunes played on the rickety porch of a tumble down shack somewhere in the Appalachian mountains.

Little stories of Peeping Toms and the police lights they bring with them, graveyards and impolite family, epigrams against disaster, depression, simple forgetfulness, all delivered so effortlessly that the precision of the delivery registers long after it's substance has left it's mark. When she sings "I'm not hiding anything / I'm not trying to fool you at all," in a song titled "That's All There Is," it is all the truth.

Reissued on limited edition 180 gram Clear vinyl.

Tracklist:
1 Run, All You
2 I Go with Him
3 This Is What It Is
4 Oh, My Stars
5 All for You
6 So Little
7 Desert Fly
8 Ugly Face
9 In the Graveyard
10 Ocean
11 Rosemary
12 The Same Day
13 Been So Long
14 The Very Next Day
15 Little Angel
16 That's All There Is