On The Blackened Air (her second album but first for Touch and Go), Nastasia and her band continue to keep the line short to the point of vanishing, even as they expand on the more straightforward, almost sing-song qualities of her debut. Both records were documented by Steve Albini in Chicago. Where they were once content to support a vocal melody, they now pry it apart and look down its throat. The stringed and wind instruments (viola, cello, mandolin, accordion, bowed saw, acoustic and electric guitars) reach up out of the songs into rarified territory. Little stories of Peeping Toms and the police lights they bring with them. Graveyards and impolite family. Epigrams against disaster, depression, simple forgetfulness, delivered so effortlessly that the precision of the delivery registers long after its substance has left its 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.
A generation-plus of young troubadours pine for things they never had to lose, as if sadness and depression were inevitable consequences of being alive. Nastasia's music is an antidote to all of that. The Blackened Air is a darkish record not just in title, but by examining everything without caving in to decadence or solipsism, it's a rejuvenating experience. It's informed, without affect, unique, and succinct. Above all, it's beautiful to hear and a pleasure to have in one's home.
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