Although it may come as a surprise to some, Nina Nastasia has a pretty good sense of humor. At her shows, her onstage whiskey drinking can lead to some interesting banter with audiences; one Dublin lad’s compliment was greeted with the response, “Aw, that’s so sweet,” but when he attempted further gallantry, not a beat was missed before the air conditioning was switched on again: “Okay shut up now,” she barked. (And he did.) After several critically acclaimed records, you might expect Nastasia to indulge in such mid-career belt loosening, and in some ways she sounds freer on Outlaster, her sixth album, soaking the sturdy kegs of her songs with her becomingly dark voice. But Outlaster is too ambitious to let go completely, remaining grimly determined to steal a march on previous successful efforts.
For this record, Nastasia and partner Kennan Gudjonsson hired arranger Paul Bryan along with a string quartet and a woodwind section to flesh out her songs on a scale that hadn’t been attempted previously. Unchecked ambition often becomes apparent when the orchestra is called in — a lesson Metallica taught us many years ago — and unfortunately for Nastasia, she possesses a reputation for being serious, deliberate, and (especially to her fans) reliable. In one way, this is a privilege that allows her to play with her image onOutlaster. Take the album cover: those blank eyes, the Medusa hair — all the better to steal the souls of the neighborhood children. On the other hand, it’s unfortunate for her to have earned this reputation for steeliness, as whatever moves she makes in the future are more likely to be viewed as self-parody; either that or they’ll be the kind of risk-taking that causes fans to flap their hands in protest like over-protective parents.
Fortunately, she has the presence of mind to work with these tensions, building Outlaster from the ground up. More than any previous record, Outlaster is self-conscious about the ‘gothic’ elements within it. The songs halfway through the album, particularly “What’s Out There” and “This Familiar Way,” openly exploit the violin’s potential for creepiness. “What’s Out There”’ unsettling imagery — “A natty garden turning hotly in the heat” — is accompanied by a sequence of plucked and dampened strings that sound like they’re snapping. “This Familiar Way” takes a different approach, displaying a rare sensuality. It is Nastasia’s first tango, and it also wears its Eastern folk/gypsy jazz influences on its sleeve at long last, after many years in which these styles were only present in the background. Here again, the hint of bombast seems vaguely self-deprecating, as if Nastasia knows that under the guise of her Wednesday Addams-style public persona she can’t crack a smile without people wondering what’s up.
To be fair, her albums do tend to explore the darker shades of discontent; brand new records are often called ‘outings’ in jovial tabloid speak, and I like to think that Outlaster explores the perils of ‘outings’ undertaken by the emotionally fragile: how a mentally unstable person’s trip to the shops can quickly turn into a train wreck; how wheeling that depressed friend out for a quick drink can end in tears and disastrous karaoke or worse. But despite the usual underlying tension, there’s something intrepid about Outlaster, especially on the brilliant title track, which describes a kind of spiritual seafaring (rattling ‘rope’ sounds are manufactured by an instrument I can’t place). This track is also the album’s final one, and it underlines the point that human beings can persevere long enough to ‘outlast’ most crises.
Apparently Nastasia came to the realization during the making of Outlaster that her sound had hit a wall. If I could give her one piece of advice (as all meddling fans would love to do), I’d base it upon a cartoon I once read, which warned: “There’s a such thing as going too retro.” The warning referred to a drawing of a guy with a handlebar moustache sitting atop a penny farthing bike, looking dismayed after arriving at a fancy dress party where everyone else was dressed in 70s hippie gear. Unlike this hapless cartoon guy, Nastasia’s music has actually fit quite comfortably so far into a loose folk/Americana scene that draws its inspiration from the 1870s rather than the 1970s (witness the prevalence of handlebar moustaches and pretentious bikes among the hipsters of today). So it’s perfectly acceptable for her to exploit such lines as “I idled so far my rigging froze.” In fact, there is more conviction in the tracks that are in a traditional singer/songwriter mode, the ones that seem unconcerned with the idea of battling a ‘dark’ persona, working instead to create an atmospheric ‘pastness’ around the subject, whether it’s youth misspent in the 1990s, abandoned American towns of the 1890s, or “Outlaster”’s seafaring lament straight out of the 1790s. Sometimes, this almost anthropological approach can even illuminate forgotten episodes from the history of a relationship, such as on “Cry, Cry, Baby” and “One Way Out.”
If there is a way for Nastasia to resolve the tension between purity and experimentation that seems to haunt her work, it might be reached through accepting the unmoored nature of her talents — ‘too retro’ for current trends (even the retro ones that keep her company from time to time), but blessed with a non-judgmental outsider’s point of view (Nastasia has claimed for instance that she rarely listens to music). Her plain, powerful voice shouldn’t be obliged to deconstruct complex arrangements in favor of coming up with something self-consciously ‘scary.’ And so the strings on “Moves Away” are more effective than the frantic scratchings on “What’s Out There,” introducing themselves in an unusually stately and even Pachelbel-esque manner. If there is excess to be trimmed, it’s not in the orchestral padding, but in some of the overly gothic atmospherics, particularly when they are turned almost violently upon her own persona. Having said this, one of the main strengths of Outlaster is the way that it is always conscious of the perilous nature of its adventure and uses this tension to express personal as well as artistic struggles. See “This Familiar Way”’s admission — “If I could I’d live alone/ I never would and never will” — and “Holy Man”’s pessimism about the individual’s capacity to “stay holy.” Ultimately, the wry honesty with which these personal and artistic struggles are treated make Outlaster a complex and rewarding album, despite its flaws.