Marissa Nadler‘s sixth LP July, due out February 4th, will be her first release for the Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. On the new record, Nadler teams up with Seattle’s eminently talented, and always in-demand producer/engineer/musician Randall Dunn, and July was recorded at the cities’ long-standing Avast Studios. Nadler is joined here by the experimental musician Eyvind Kang, who adds strings, as well as Steve Moore, maybe best known for his keyboard and bass-work with Zombi, on synths, and Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter’s Phil Wandscher, on guitar. The track “Dead City Emily” finds Nadler’s voice as gorgeous as ever, and, though, seemingly in a confessional mode with an opening line like, “I was coming apart those days/I don’t give a damn about the way”, her delivery is so completely unaffected and open. Coupled with the track’s quiet, unfolding guitar meditation, this is some of Nadler’s most arresting and haunting work. The video for the track was directed by Derrick Belcham and Emily Terndrup, and it features performances from Nadler, Terndrup and Austin Tyson. The video makes great use of a simple set-up involving what appears to be two hanging window panes, with a bright, white spotlight in the background, and filming thru this set-up, it presents intimately choreographed kinetics between the male and female performers, using the backlit stage-set to abstract the dancers in halos of light burst!
