live: nadja
(photo by l_c_m_tt_)
What is the proper speed for heavy metal? Is it always fast and treacherous? Must is always raze and pillage? Can’t a group just chill out for a few minutes?
These were the questions posed by Nadja, the Canadian metal duo of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, over the course of a restrained, frequently mesmerizing show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool last night.
To be fair, Nadja were never anyone’s idea of a conventional metal band. Their numerous full-lengths (they’ve released three so far this year) are comprised mostly of 17- and 18-minute drones, as unsettling as they are insistently shapeless. This year’s splendid When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV, one of their more conventional outings, is a covers record that manages to make Elliott Smith‘s “Needle in the Hay” sound like a Satanic doxology.
What Nadja does well is distill metal to a few distinct components. Last night’s show began with tiny yelps of sound, a few stray, gleaming pinpricks that the duo gradually spun into an expansive constellation. The first half of the night was given over to experimenting. Baker and Buckareff constructed winding passages of sound, finding new ways to connect and to layer endless, whistling tones. It wasn’t until the final segment that the volume came up and the group began ladling thick, tarry riffs over thudding, dead-eyed drum-machine percussion. And while the duo is hardly charismatic – Buckareff played the entire show with her back to the audience – there is a kind of surrender that comes after about 30 minutes of being submerged in their strange, surging drones. To put it another way: Nadja doesn’t command attention so much as lull into zombielike submission.
What was particularly fascinating on Saturday was the way Baker and Buckareff treated feedback like an instrument: most of their compositions were crafted from high, wailing pitches, captured and looped over and over. Baker – who sang on just two songs, and even then only briefly – spent as much time crouched over an effects board as he did tending to his instruments. And rather than pluck individual notes, Buckareff played her bass with a bow, undercutting the hellish shrieks of feedback with a continual, ominous moan.
The show’s best moments came when Baker allowed himself to step out from the din and peel off what, in Nadja’s universe, passes for a solo. Long, slow and anguished, the pealing high-notes could hardly be mistaken for guitar virtuosity, and yet they possessed a kind of tragic beauty — a wounded bird doing a few sad final circles before its inevitable plunge to the earth.
If last night’s performance failed to deliver the kind of chest-collapsing impact their records promise, it wasn’t the band’s fault. They had apparently, via excessive, thundering volume, blown out one of their amplifiers the night before.
If that’s not metal, what is?
So noise is a kind of music in itself? Is this like the Maude Lebowski, ultra modern paintings where we’re supposed to see the artistry in splodges of paint flung from a harness? If I want to surrender to a noise I’ll put my head in the washing machine… IMO music like this lacks a sense of humour – check out some Dragonforce and chuckle along.
Yeah, making a huge noise that your audience has to surrender to sounds fun: where’s the sense of humour in this kind of music. Metal (and anything else) is better when it’s able to recognise it’s own ridiculousness – like Dragonforce for example. Now that’s funny.
Where’s the fun? I don’t want to surrender to a wall of noise that could be thrashed out by a wounded bird (to unfairly paraphrase). Let’s go and chuckle our way through a Dragonforce concert instead.
Metal (and anything else) is better when it’s able to recognise it’s own ridiculousness – like Dragonforce for example. Now that’s funny.
My opinion is almost exactly the opposite. Anything even remotely jokey drives me up the wall.
It seems someone’s dad has managed to access the Internet unsupervised…
I was lucky enough to see Nadja perform in an extremely small log-cabin-like structure. They do metal but it’s slowed down, stretched out, and warped to a point where it’s practically unrecognizable as such. But, it is metal, even if for most metal bands it’s only the bridge without the lead instruments stretched out to the point of infinity. It’s perfect music to bliss out to. Of course I don’t remember there being much screeching when I saw em.
I’m really not much of a metal-head, but wow, do I like to put on my headphones and disappear into the enveloping noise of a Nadja album. I can only imagine what they’d be like live. If I ever get the chance to see them, you can bet I will.
Cruising music. This is the kind of music that is good for long drives. You can sink into it without it distracting you from the road.