Live music review: Marissa Nadler

Button Factory, Dublin

Marissa Nadler’s music drifts somewhere between Lana Del Rey b-side and Emily Dickinson poem. Looking like a refugee from a Southern Gothic novel, she has striking shoulder length hair and wears a vivid red dress of the sort that tends to feature as a plot device in David Lynch movies. Without singing a note, she has already cast a spell.

Musically, Nadler, a Massachusetts native based in Washington DC, proceeds from sad and lulling chamber pop to cranked-up melancholia. Her voice is gauzy and cooing — at moments she is a dead ringer for Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval — but her songs have a razor-blade heart. Juxtaposing calming melodies with dark lyrics is one of pop’s older tricks, but she pulls it off better than most.

This year’s July is her sixth full length affair and captures her strengths and weaknesses as a writer. At its best, the record is hypnotically intense, her voice paired with stark gusts of melody. In places, the listener might be forgiven for thinking they were listening to a forgotten eighties ‘shoe gaze’ act — there are tunes and dip and weave, ultimately losing their way in swells of murk.

Live, the special ingredient is her soulful charisma. She brings immense presence, is transcendentally imposing as she wraps her tonsils around ‘Was It Your Name’, ‘I’ve Got A Dream’ and ‘The Wrecking Ball Company’. Nadler is a bewitching presence: an esoteric songbird you can’t take your eyes off.