As a young girl from Southern California, Nina Nastasia found her sense of freedom on the Pacific Coast Highway, a stretch of road that promised picnics on the beach, lazy heat and days that felt oceanic and undefined. Nastasia faced freedom once again in her 50s when she learned to drive again and returned to the Pacific Coast Highway in search of a home that no longer existed. Jolie LaideNastasia's new self-titled project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod is a kind of travelogue that traces the line between freedom and void of purpose: a child's freedom by the ocean becoming an adult's existential dread.
Before her trip, Nastasia had lived most of her adult life in New York, sharing a small apartment with her partner and musical partner Kennan Gudjonsson. From the late '90s to the mid-2000s, she earned a cult following for her songwriting—part gothic, part Americana, full of emotions that confused and contradicted each other. John Peel and Steve Albini count Nastasia among their favorite musicians. She released her sixth album in 2010 and then, for over a decade, seemed to disappear. In 2022 it was released A horse without a riderher first album in 12 years, which was written immediately after the death of her partner and partly explained her absence. A horse without a rider it was a spartan, frantic flashback to the couple's complicated years together, clearly and poignantly conveying Nastassia's grief.
He learned to drive again and soon after got in touch with MacLeod, a musician he had met some 20 years earlier when playing with the dark dream-pop outfit Cape May. MacLeod is a largely improvisational guitarist, riffing and subverting well-worn Americana tropes. The electric guitar appears sporadically on Nastasia's previous output, but is at the center of the mix on her first project with MacLeod. His playing adds a sense of place and cultural topography to Nastasia's cross-country roadtrip. On Jolie Laide, MacLeod digs into the repertoire of American popular song to represent the musical history of the West Coast, and draws more dull tones for Nastasia's deserts. His guitar adds a sense of sweet dread to Nastasia's emotional realism, an inventive expression of her inner world.
“Back to the west,” Nastasia begins the album, singing in her coolest voice. MacLeod's guitar is just as dynamic, but each upward stroke introduces a sense of creeping dread. The songs' intense sense of tension is strong on “Away Too Soon,” a song that Nastasia and MacLeod perform with a touch of gravity, as if they're trying and failing to pull themselves out of a dream, searching for a satisfying burst of energy that never comes Nastasia's voice is like a ball of stress. no matter how much pressure it exerts, it always returns to its original, balanced form. Similarly, MacLeod's guitar goes back and forth between major and minor, two opposing forces canceling each other out.