Nina Nastasia
Run to Ruin
Touch and Go

Given her exquisite poise while balancing acts of airless space, quarantined sound and expectant hush, Nina Nastasia doesn't stand still, not at all. She rarely crosses the same ground. As a result, we get to witness the transformation of an observer into a participant in the human drama; something unblinkingly reptilian into something vulnerably mammalian.

Run to Ruin's first song, "We Never Talked," unfolds with a lamentation for things unspoken: "We never talked/ about the things we witnessed/ what sadness came," accompanied by a two-note electric guitar figure, occasional swooping cello moans, wheezing violas and piano notes dropped like beads from a broken necklace. Nastasia hints at some looming backdrop, some event so big and tragic that it interrupts the natural two-way flow of a relationship, derailing and ultimately killing it.

Ruin's eight intricately wrought tales run short at about 30 minutes. Steve Albini, who produced Nastasia's previous The Blackened Air, must take credit once again, for close-miking yet essentially leaving the sounds alone. But Nastasia and her band are the deceptively wild prairie herd barely kept corralled by his cowboy ministrations. This music is the turbulence beneath the surface serenity, the half-arrested madness in a horse's eye.

Usually quiet though never passive, these songs lurch by, crowning, crowing, being cowed. In "The Body," a domestic assault victim must decide between cowardice and freedom (which could just as easily be oblivion): "All await the eyes to cloud/ For the will to leave the birches." These words intrude so delicately that the transformation of the personal into the universal intially passes unnoticed, while an increasingly feverish, baroque chamber orchestra struts its leering madness beneath the skies of Jim White's thunder rolls.

"Superstar" also begins with processional acoustic guitar, a plainly observational vocal tone, those peripheral-vision piano droplets, then a gradually more distorted electrical disturbance (dry lightning in the hills) as Nastasia begins to outline her misery about as convincingly as domestic bliss at a prison visit. Sit down, don't move, don't think, stand up, walk away.

An impulsive psychosis lurks beneath the hidden tidal sway of "On Teasing." Mortality, laughter and a twisted eroticism inform the teetering suicide urge of a woman atop a cliff. The fatal lure of an ocean that threatens to "swallow her whole down below for a treat" is disguised by a childish sing-song melody while strings swell ominously, a piano caresses a vertebrae of notes downward, like deadly foreplay, and White's drumming grows stormier by the second, as violins, violas and accordions cajole, lament and gleefully mock human folly.

Perhaps bleakest of all is the pitiful ménage drama of "You Her and Me." Brutally honest in its depiction of casual human cruelty, this song's slow careen between serrated cello groaning, spare tapped snare and sudden bursts of futile abandon, traces the nonchalant yet cutting disdain of a woman for the pathetic weakness of a rival. With the sonic storm all but spent, the final sentiments are even more damning in their mundane contempt: "Bawling, she asks you 'What's happening to me?'/ I walk to a payphone, call for an ambulance/ Hate her like nobody knows." Once again, as in all true art, the heartbreakingly specific becomes the contemplatively universal.

Movement and stasis, communication and silence, bravery and cowardice, kindness and cruelty, isolation and connection. For Nastasia, a world of events separated the making of two very different albums. The Blackened Air was spectral, shocking even. Run to Ruin, however, is just plain shocked. It rides the blurry haunted lines between polarities, unflinching in its gaze at both the possible (the yearned-for peaks of ecstasy) and the probable (those petty depths of human awfulness), never denying the unlikely power of the former. Wincing, yet refusing to succumb to outright cynicism or despair, it recites back to us our own stories, the long and the short, the harrowingly shameful and the starkly exultant.

— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)