Marissa Nadler

"Well, I predicted that Marissa Nadler's follow-up to Ballads of Living and Dying would go big, or at least get more exposure than Ballads. I was wrong. I had a hard time tracking down her latest album, The Saga of Mayflower May. None of the stores here in Calgary were carrying it or knew how to get it. This was very disappointing because her style of folk/roots music needs to be heard. Nadler's voice stands out as an original in this age of female vocalist's all sounding the same. The songs on Mayflower May are still as haunting as her debut but she has learned a little bit about production and this album is crisper and easier to get into. She gets lumped into the freak folk category but Marissa relies much more on the traditional side of music. I think that is the magic of her music, she manages to keep her music sounding classic and still makes it seem current. Not an easy task. If you are at all interested in freak folk or classic Appalachian style country then check out Marissa Nadler. Now I am saying that she is going to remain an undiscovered gem. Dreamy and haunting." -- MusicEmissions.com

"...A striking, silken creature with a siren's voice and mystic blood culled from some ancient well. She exudes a dark mystery"- Splendid

"The Saga of Mayflower May is haunting and beautiful (and hauntingly beautiful). Nadler's songs wisp in with the breeze like near forgotten memories of long lost loves, her voice portraying confidence and lending her tales ofwoe a soothing sense of acceptance."-fakejazz.com

In 2005 Marissa Nadler released a gorgeous and gothic psych-folk album on Eclipse Records. Nadler's voice, the most important and strongest sonic facet to her music, is majestic like a cosmic ghost or a heavenly angel; both haunt you in wondrous ways and fill the room with her power and beauty. Titled "The Saga of Mayflower May," Nadler uses mythical characters in her lyrics (many based in reality) to explore the outer edges of folklore and folk music. Although very classical in style, Nadler has carved out a distinct sound with drone-like guitar picking, strings and her singular vocal styling.

Press for Ballads of Living and Dying:

Pitchfork
Over the past couple of centuries, the definition of "ballad" has been stretched to include virtually any slow-tempo sentimental song, even on those occasions when it merely means Tommy Lee is coming out from behind his kit to play the piano. But once upon a time the word indicated a more specific, codified form of verse. In the days before widespread literacy, a ballad was a dramatic (frequently tragic) story-poem that functioned as something of an oral newspaper, constructed simply with recurring rhymes so that it could be easily remembered and repeated. And on her captivating debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler does her small part to retrn ballary to its vivid and illustrious past.
On the surface this might not sound like a compelling proposition, but fortunately Nadler has the sort of voice that you'd follow straight to Hades. Her luxurious, resonant soprano is immediately transfixing, and throughout these songs it envelops the listener like a dense fog rolling in off the moors. Nadler's vocals are highly reminiscent of Hope Sandoval's-- with perhaps the faintest glimmer of the languid phrasing of cabaret chanteuse Marlene Dietrich-- and her unadorned arrangements recall the rain-weary solitude of early Leonard Cohen met with Mazzy Star or Opal at their most hazily narcotic.
Nadler is clearly savvy enough in her material to know that a true collection of ballads must include a body count, and the most obviously successful auld school example here is her arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Annabelle Lee". As you might recall from junior high English, this is a classic tale of ill-starred love with a stretched-by-your-grave finale that fits the ballad form to perfection, and Nadler's melodic rendition here is flawless. And poor Annabelle Lee is not this album's only casualty; there's also "Virginia", which respectfully chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf, as well as dreamier, more ambiguous songs like "Undertaker" and "Box of Cedar" which certainly contain whispers of foreboding for their subjects.
Each song on the album comes lightly-dressed, usually borne along by little more than Nadler's voice, her fingerpicked guitars, and ornamental flourishes from the occasional accordion, autoharp, or blurry wisp of feedback. On "Hay Tantos Muertos", one the album's loveliest tracks, Nadler branches out from the strict balladic format, quoting lines from Pablo Neruda's haunting "No Hay Olvido" ("There Is No Forgetting") in a manner resembling a traditional Portuguese fado, and on "Days of Rum" she busts out a banjo and takes an enchanting turn at a Dock Boggs-style country blues.
It's worth noting that, aside from the Poe and Neruda quotes, all of these songs are original compositions rather than the traditional works they appear. Throughout the album Nadler writes and performs with a weathered maturity that belies her young age. In fact, several tracks ("Mayflower May", "Days of Rum", "Fifty-Five Falls") seem to be narrated from the perspective of older women looking back upon the adventures and mistakes of their youth. Also an accomplished visual artist, Nadler's lyrics showcase a perceptive eye and a genuine empathy for her creations; and when coupled with that intoxicating voice the resulting landscape is one you may want to get lost in for a century or two. - Matthew Murphy, pitchforkmedia.com

THE WIRE
"Nadler first came to notice as one of the wildcards on last year's Tom Rapp tribute put together by Secret Eye, and as her inlcusion there makes clear, she favours dark folk ballads that reach far into the blackest areas of space. Her debut album Ballads of Living and Dying is a beauty...The LP's back cover fearures some cryptic artwork that looks like a nod towards Current 93's epochal Swastikas for Noddy album, and references to other decadent fantasists and folkloric topes dot the record, culminating in her setting of Edgar Allen Poe's Annagelle Lee for acoustic and electric guitar. Buit it's her own compositions, with titles like "Stallions" and "Box of Cedar", that leave the heaviest afterimages in the air; beautiful hybrids of dark-hearted Bert Jansch-style folk, and drugged, wieghtless psych." David Keenan, the Wire, UK

Uncut Magazine: Four Star Rating
...Marissa Nadler's music betrays a scholarly appreciation of the most resonant of folk traditions, the death ballad. Ballads of Living and Dying revels in the arcane and gothic, filled as it is with allusions to Poe and songs called ' The Undertaker ' and ' Box of Cedar '. A tad hokey on paper perhaps, but these 10 finely crafted songs are gorgeous in practice. Nadler's tone of faraway melancholy is utterly convincing and, accompanied largely by her own perfumed strums, could be being broadcast from a candlelit nook in Topanga Canyon circa 1971. A benchmark of sorts, for the new psyche folk underground.'

The London Gaurdian
New York folk player Marissa Nadler lives in our times, but she recalls some lost siren of the mystic Sixties or a heroine of the high Romantic period. Her willowy songs are concerned with death and doomed love and she goes as far as to quote Edgar Allan Poe (on 'Annabelle Lee') and Pablo Neruda (on 'Hay Tantos Muertos'). These ballads are uncommonly lovely - unshowy, but hard to get out of your head. Nadler's voice, as delicate as smoke, swirls distantly over her picking and strumming. She uses guitars, banjos and ukuleles, but the atmosphere here is less hokey than haunted, as though the songs were oscillating, suspended, between this world and the next. -Kitty Empire, the London Gaurdian

The BBC
I love it when music evokes a mood, and with Marissa Nadler's debut the mood is very chilling and soothing. Nadler's voice plus her simple, bare-to-the-bone music makes this a confident record. In some strange way it actually manages to project her out of the record and into the living room.Maybe I am being too personal, but this is a personal record. Saying that, unlike other female singer-songwriters she isn't claustrophobic with her emotions. Nadler is singing to you and you are her audience. It is a bit melancholic but it suits the mood so well. Plus the album flows so freely you won't even know that time has passed. Although I did say the music is sparse there are little touches which make it endearing. An accordian in Fifty-Five Falls gives the track an odd sea shanty air. The double-tracking (or back up) voice in Box of Cedar strengthens the song immensely. And so on.When I listen to this I think of Hope Sandoval or Vashti Bunyan. But Nadler has her own distinctive style and personally I can't wait to hear more offerings from this bright talent. -by way of alternativemalta.com

Aquarius Records of San Fransisco
We've been loving this record for a while now and are only finally now getting around to reviewing it just in time for its release on cd (it was only on lp there for a while). This is a dark and langorous trip through a sonic world of bleak skies, neverending sorrow, lost love, death and dying and all sorts of somber miserablism. The music itself is lush and rich, a warm rainy soundscape of muted finger picked guitars, augmented by occasional banjo, ukele, and autoharp, all lashed together into a modern melding of classic Appalachia, psych folk and classic songcraft. But it's Nadler's voice that is the most mesmerising part of Ballads Of The Dying, rich, velvety and throaty, completely captivating, and surprisingly reminiscent of Neko Case, but instead of the country wildcat Case, here's she's a rainsoaked and bedraggled innocent, seemingly beaten down but emanating an inner strength, a hidden power, that comes through in her powerful voice. This is one of those records that seems pleasant enough on first listen, but as you dig deeper, the songs and stories unfold and you quickly find your self living and loving and crying and dying right along with Nadler and the characters she has populated her musical world with.

Forced Exposure
Winter is heading our way but upon hearing Marissa Nadler's debut 'Ballads Of Living And Dying' LP we're positive cold hands won't be an issue this year. Her songs are dipped in a melancholic sauce of ethereal elements. Her songwriting mostly deals with tragic deaths - forbidden fates and stormy suicides where nostalgia and melodrama dance hand in hand around the trees. Beautifull fingerpicking acoustic guitar that blend perfectly with her smoky soprano voice. An ideal companion for long somber days. alone in the dark dreaming about the next sunrise. Eclipse made this haunting record available in a limited edition of only 500 copies. the light shines bright at the top of the folk hill!

Foxy Digitalis
It has been an effulgent year in the musical catacombs, and one gem shines brighter than most: 23 year old singer/songwriter and painter Marissa Nadler. Born somewhere between the Renaissance and the turn of the century, she possesses the kind of seductive, velvety soprano that instantly burrows its way into the heart and soul. Doused in a wash of reverb, and backed with acoustic guitar, banjo, organ and more, the voice relays tales of fading beauty queens and sad souls lost in the shadows of introspection in a style that's informed of old Americana and older English, but run through a post psychedelic prism.

French Site
"Ballads of Living and Dying" (Eclipse), an acoustic dream meeting between early Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, is among the most haunting folk debuts of 2004. Though it's mostly her own material, two tracks feature the words of Pablo Neruda and Edgar Allen Poe sung by Nadler over her music. Hearing her interpretation of Poe's "Annabelle Lee" is much like hearing some faded childhood memory conveyed with such an impressionistic touch, it may have just been a dream all along.
And here that precisely, these days, I acquire of a superb disc, sensual, sad and enivrant of which it project superintendent is not other than a sublime princess of the name of Marissa Nadler.The disc in question is called "Ballads of Living and Dying" and it is definitively my blow of heart of this end of the year in the slowcore kind.

HARP Magazine
Marissa's voice soars like the choir invisible on "Ballad To An Amber Lady," the opening track to the second volume of the Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine tribute trilogy, For the Dead In Space.. [On Ballads of Living and Dying] a gentle collection of folky ballads, highlighted by Nadler's hauntingly beautiful, angelic vocals. "Fifty Five Falls" opens the album with an achingly forlorn and lonely vocal over a haunting backing, while "Virginia" lightens the load somewhat with a lilting, swaying Leonard Cohen-esque melody. Marissa breaks out the banjo for "Stallions," one of those old time murder ballads that Timothy Renner does so well in his Stone Breath and, particularly, Spectral Light & Moonshine Firefly Snakeoil Jamboree projects. As such, it's a perfect candidate for his next Hand/Eye wyrdfolk compilation. The organ that dances around Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda's "Hay Tantos Muertos" ["There Are So Many Deaths"] adds a bit of hope and a touch of old European charm to her haunting interpretation. Finally, the album closes with another poignant murder ballad, "Bed of Solid Stone," an instant wyrdfolk classic. At the time of writing, Ms. Nadler was entertaining offers from several labels to release this gem. Whoever the winner of the "sign Marissa Nadler sweepstakes" is, they can rest assured they have one of the year's finest releases on their hands. -Jeff Penczak

Pyschedelic Homestead, Belgium
Marissa's voice reminded me at first a bit of Elizabeth Rapp, who didn't appear on many songs of Tom Rapp's group Pearls Before Swine (back at the end of the 60's, early 70's), but what Marissa has created in mood is vivid here as well, be it in a more melancholic way. The arrangements are sparse and to the essence completely interwoven with the songs (guitar, accordion, amplified guitar, organ, banjo,). Each of these songs have a variety of very dark thoughts combined with gentle pure loveliness and absolute care. It is hard for me to go deeper into the songtexts, because who knows I can hardly experience the total depth of it. And it shows deeper waters of experiences. Her interpretation of "Annabelle Lee" on words of Edgar Allan Poe is simply brilliant. Other favourites are "Fifty Five falls", (I'll be your..)"Undertaker", and "Days of Rum" with banjo. I lack the words. A release I simply can not help but listen to again and again."

Neumu.net
She's like a young Stevie Nicks, all doped up and duped to serve as Devendra Banhart's geisha. Nah, too strong for that. How 'bout Donovan reincarnated as Linda Ronstadt? Except instead of a '70s pop star, in this life she's Fairy Queen of the Muir Woods, a mythical creature spotted only by hippie chicks who dare to eat strange mushrooms and venture into the redwoods past nightfall. Or maybe she just sounds like a burnt-out Neko Case on a sad bender. You'll have to forgive me Û I woke up this morning feeling a wee bit simile. It's listening to this rare, ravishing recording, I think, that's done it. Marissa Nadler's music doesn't so much play from your speakers as it emanates. It's more subtle a sense than sound; her long, breathy tones hit like a smell, some nostalgic wisp that tickles the ol' factories, reminding you of past happenings you can't quite seem to remember. Or maybe ones you don't quite want to. Her debut's entitled Ballads of Living and Dying, but it's more of that last part that awakened Marissa's muse. Seems lots of records are springing up from the graves right about now; Panda Bear's got one Û hell, the Arcade Fire even named theirs Funeral. Nadler's debut slides nicely in that sarcophagus comp, bridging the gap between Regin» Chassagne's shrill soprano and Panda's minimal folk musings. These sepulchral ballads are built mostly upon a shaky guitar strum, a laboring four-part pick, a voice that drifts like chimney smoke. Yes, that's the smell you were trying to remember! That of fresh-burning firewood, of the first drop in the mercury that scares up kindling, of graying skies and grayer eyes. It's the all-encompassing sense of winter, the sights and sounds and smells as October passes to November and then December, and Marissa Nadler captures it perfectly here: a shivering slide-guitar that sings its own song on "Fifty Five Falls," or the metallic ring of a banjo, its notes falling like snowflakes, ushering in the decidedly Case-esque "Days of Rum." Every time her chilly instrumentation begins to bite, though, Nadler's voice wraps it up in a soft, safe blanket. It's the thing that'll keep you coming back to this, in the end; when you're longing for long days peering through glass panes, wrapping your hands around warm cocoa cups, smelling split cedar and smoldering oak, give the Fairy Queen a call. Devendra won't mind if you borrow her for a while." - Noah Bonaparte

Dusted Magazine
Impeccably recorded and accompanied by Myles Baer, Marissa Nadler, with voice and finger, crafts beautifully ghostlike compositions with a preternatural ease. To say that there’s not one throwaway among the ten “ballads” on Living and Dying is to say much. Each piece, whether lightly disseminated, or plied in a deliberately witchy manner, is totally enthralling, either by way of Nadler’s milky voice or ebullient finger picking. And it’s really these two facets that stay in the forefront. Nadler’s voice, redolent of an early Stevie Nicks cum Hope Sandoval, moves from deeply staid to stickily rapturous – often within the confines of the same piece. And Nadler’s guitar works in similar extremes, with a hat off to Roy Harper and a nembutal’d nod to the most agreeable side of Mr. Donovan Leitch. The whole of Living, especially the tracks “Fifty Five Falls,” and “Mayflower May,” show Nadler to be somewhat of an anomaly: This record sounds like something to be slated for future reissue on Italy’s psych imprint Akarma, not released in the 21st century.Whether it’s the womby reverb of Nadler’s voice, or the solid expertise of her – and her accompanist’s – instrumental prowess, this is a record for repetitive listens and dark contemplation. , -Stewart Voegtlin, dusted magazine

musicemissions.com
I recently was on a business trip down to San Francisco and found myself in the amazing Aquarius Records. As I was shopping I was taken by the music that was playing over the system. It was the most beautiful folk-style music I had heard. Captivating is about the closest I can describe. This lady's voice just seeped into every I enquired on the artist and was told that it was Marissa Nadler. Ballads of Living and Dying is Marissa's first album and it is one of the finest examples of folk ballads in the past 10 years. The songs are romantic and yet very haunting in the same breath. There is not much to these songs. They are mostly just an acoustic instrument (guitar, banjo, etc) and her achingly beautiful voice. A little bit of studio trickery with echoing her voice but the production is very minimal. This just lends itself to the heartfelt music contained within. Any Gillian Welch fans should run out and grab Living and Dying. They may not go back to Gillian after they hear Nadler. Now I've just read an article on her in the latest Fader magazine. Hopefully she gets some exposure from that article. A new album is to be expected as early as April/May.-Dennis Scanland

Free Houston Press
Very rarely has an album's title so accurately been given as Marissa Nadler's "Ballads Of Living And Dying." All of the songs are about life and death, and the music arouses reflective thoughts and mourning and the darkness that looms over our decorative arrangements. Her finger picked guitar strums and ghost like timber touch the parts of your soul that you use pills and therapy to remedy. The album opener "55 Falls" opens the gate to this village, and re-introduces you to those things you thought were abandoned. "Mayflower May" is the walk a long the desolate countryside that inspires thoughts of the girl who never spoke in class, but her silence was like screaming. There are "happy" moments like "Box Of Cedar" which is basically is a celebration of life in the midst of the death. She sings "I'm going to tell everybody that I'm glad to see you, even though you're coming home in a box of cedar," and many parents and wives can relate to this as they see their loved ones returned deceased based on Bush's "intelligence" mistake. Then there are songs of realization like "Bird Song " where she sings, "You said my name so sweetly, that I took my clothes right off, " however she realizes that she heard the birds singing and it was not for her, so it gets sad again. I love this album and not because I like misery, but because it is a contrast to the shut up and party mentality that dominates popular culture, sometimes you need to sit your ass down and cry, or at least mourn.

Press for The Saga of Mayflower May

Pitchfork
Marissa Nadler's 2004 album Ballads of Living and Dying was a burnished gem of entrancing, spectral folk, and with her follow-up she not only returns to the luminous musical landscape of her debut but also to her enigmatic character Mayflower May. Though not the cohesive narrative its title implies, The Saga of Mayflower May again finds Nadler skillfully echoing the forms of traditional English balladry as she crafts another captivating collection of songs steeped in the melancholy of distant, half-forgotten passion, doomed love affairs, and various crimes of the heart. As a vocalist Nadler is considerably less idiosyncratic than such peers as Joanna Newsom or Josephine Foster, and here her dusky, lived-in soprano settles diffusely between contemporaries like Hope Sandoval and Chan Marshall, and 60s-era folkies like Vashti Bunyan or Mimi Farina. On these 11 tracks her arrangements are kept simple and powder dry, typically featuring only her 12-string guitar and the occasional flourish of organ, ukelele, or flute as accompaniment. With this spare instrumentation providing an understated backdrop, Nadler sounds increasingly relaxed and confident throughout the album, and each performance sparkles with haunting, rain-swept emotion. Tracks like "The Little Famous Song" and "Horses and Their Kin", are further distinguished by mesmerizing wordless passages where it almost sounds as though she's attempting to use her voice to approximate the lonesome shimmer of a singing saw.
The significance of the character Mayflower May to these songs is unclear. Nadler has previously described May-- who also made a couple appearances in the lyrics of Ballads of Living and Dying-- as a lonely old woman of faded beauty. And though May is never mentioned by name on any of these songs, perhaps one is to assume that nostalgia-laden, first-person accounts like the opening "Under an Old Umbrella" or the rapturous "Calico" are intended to feature May as narrator.
Also a talented visual artist, Nadler naturally fills her lyrics with color, and these songs abound with azure skies, turquoise eyes, and (especially) ruby red blood. On tracks like "Yellow Lights" and "Mr. John Lee (Velveteen Rose)" Nadler fearlessly enters traditional murder ballad territory, exquisitely depicting a world where love is forever shadowed by loss.
Curiously, for the dramatic "Lily, Henry, and the Willow Trees" the album's lyric sheet includes a final, particularly gory verse that leaves little doubt as to the fate of poor Lily. Perhaps finding these lines out of keeping with her music's otherwise deft, subtle touch, Nadler leaves them unsung, one of the few instances on this enthralling album where she pulls any punches whatsoever. - Matthew Murphy

Other Music, New York City
The beautiful, sad love songs on Marissa Nadler's tremendous sophomore effort The Saga of Mayflower May are surprisingly even better than those on last year's widely acclaimed Ballads of Living and Dying . She's a singer-songwriter of a talent far beyond her young years. Her mysterious voice, which many critics have compared to Hope Sandoval's, is gorgeous and evocative, especially when it's layered in multi-tracked harmony. In the wake of last year's new folk explosion, I expected Nadler to have been picked up by a much larger label at this point, but she's still with the relatively obscure Eclipse imprint, run out of tiny Bullhead City, Arizona. Perhaps it's a display of Nadler's musical integrity. She may be a contemporary folkie, but she seems somewhat removed from the current trends. She doesn't have the "weird" voice of Joanna Newsom, or Devendra Banhart's eccentricity, or the experimentalism of Six Organs of Admittance. Instead, there's something a lot more classic and old-fashioned about her approach, which makes The Saga Of Mayflower May seem quite a bit more timeless than many of the other records that have been coming out of this genre. [RH]

Pyschedelic Homestead, Belgium, Gerald Van Waes. Five Stars
A friend of mine, when visiting, was curious if I knew of another rich coloured voice like for instance, Sandy Denny. I couldn’t convince him with Mandy Morton, but Marissa Nadler blew him away. And indeed, each song of Marissa's shows its own worlds in poetry, in growth like a flower, shining gently, accompanied by the spiral-wards splendid acoustic guitarpicking. From her earlier demo with different, easier guitar, and with a beautiful transformed dark melancholic melody is “Yellow Lights”. “Old Love haunts me in the morning”, acoustic guitar, voice, and some piano, for me is almost like the voice of love itself, sadly unreachable, but therefore also beautiful and pure, as a spring-time condition. Somehow all inspirations on this album are as much related to nature, on various levels of inspiration.“Calico” might be something like her place into the picture. “Horses and their kin” is a perfect closer with 12-string guitar fingerpicking and various vocal chorus arrangements. Brilliant ! For me already one of my favourite releases of the last couple of years. A future classic ! It will be released by Eclipse Records in America and Beautiful Happiness, a new label from England, is putting it out for european listeners.

Jeff Penczak - May, 2005 Issue of the Terrascope
Ed Hardy scooped up Ms. Nadler's marvelous debut 'Ballads of Living and Dying' for his eclectic Eclipse imprint based on the ecstatic word-of-mouth recommendations her CD-R was garnering among folk aficianados and the underground indie cognoscenti, including yours truly. Rewarded with one of last year's finest folk releases, Hardy and Eclipse bring us Nadler's sophomore effort, and I'm pleased to announce it exceeds the great expectations of her debut. Marissa seems more focused and relaxed this time out, and the sparse arrangements (essentially just Marissa and her acoustic guitar) of these eleven self-penned tracks deliver an intimate coffee house/living room vibe where every emotional nuance of her sweet lilting voice can be poked, pried and appreciated. Throughout, the reverbed vocals still bear more than a passing hint of Buffy Sainte-Marie, particularly on tracks like 'Mr. John Lee (Velveteen Rose),' but the swaying melodies and rolling guitar lines also have a distinct strolling minstral quality, and 'Old Love Haunts Me in the Morning' seems to have learned its melody from one of Marissa's inspired teachers, Leonard Cohen.Aiding and abetting Marissa's acoustic guitar backing, co-producer Brian McTear adds just the right flourish of Hammond organ to tracks like 'Mr John Lee' and 'My Little Lark,' Nick Castro's tin whistling on 'The Little Famous Song' adds a hint of melancholy to this lovely ditty, and Marissa breaks out her ukelele for 'In the Time of Lorry Low.' With her uncanny sense of melody that is often as simple yet memorable as a child's nursery rhyme or Medieval ballad (the latter track and 'The Little Famous Song' being perfect examples), there's a nostalgic air of familiarity about these songs - as if you've heard these melodies somewhere before - yet they are all strikingly new. The ability to make the new sound old again is one of Marissa's many endearing charms, making this perhaps more attractive to fans of traditional folkies like Vashti Bunyan or Alisha Sufit and the contemporary work of Sharron Kraus than the more pop-infected work of Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. Regardless of your personal preferences, Nadler's infectious warmth is undeniable and these reflective, melancholic, ocassionally haunting ballads will remain with you long after the angelic choir of her soaring backing vocals on the final verse of the eerie closer, 'Horses and Their Kin' fades into the night. Another brilliant winner and, perhaps, the year's finest folk album.

Comes With A Smile Magazine
I’m sure that I’ve not been alone in double-taking Marissa Nadler’s contemporary status. ‘The Saga of Mayflower May’ is the greatest, lost acid-folk classic that I ever did hear, continuing the atmospheric groundwork of her debut album ‘Ballads of Living and Dying'. This is no mere pastiche, however: the strength of Nadler’s compositions may have roots in the traditions of American and Anglo Gaelic folk styles, stripped back post-psychedelia and even the heartbreak of Portuguese fado, but Nadler makes these disparate styles her own. Nadler’s emotional vibration of a voice, drawing comparisons as wide as Karen Dalton, Judy Dyble and Hope Sandoval, shimmers over cyclical Leonard Cohen-esque finger picked compositions for acoustic guitar, the proceedings fleshed out by tasteful use of organ, chimes and recorder. This release sees Nadler honing her craft by stripping back the arrangements and showcasing her considerable grasp of melody: songs like Yellow Lights and Famous Song instantly burrow deep into the listener’s psyche. Even though the strong melodies open a door into Nadler’s world, her domain is one shrouded in melancholy and mystery that subsequent listening fail to completely unravel. The eleven songs that comprise ‘Mayflower May’ generate an atmosphere of heat-haze distance, unveiling an uncompromising vision as personal as the likes of ‘Astral Weeks‘. A highly recommended release. -Simon Berkovitch

The Observer London
The trickle of bewitching new folk music coming out of the US has become a steady stream. After Devendra Banhart, Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom (the latter is an acquired taste) come the dulcet minor key compositions of Marissa Nadler, who can't fail to enchant even the most folk-proof listener. Like Sandy Denny at a seance, Nadler breathes her dusty soprano into songs about death and thwarted love. The Saga of Mayflower May is her second album and follows on seamlessly from last year's Ballads of Living and Dying, all circular plucking, wistful remembrance and pressed-flower country-gothic charm. 'Horses and Their Kin' is especially haunted. - Kitty Empire, the London Gaurdian

MOJO Magazine
..[She] seems most at home in the spectral world of spooky...folk music. Her favourite lyrical theme - that one bad love can forever ruin a good woman – has plenty of precedents, but few such tales climax quite as brutally as the epic Lily, Henry and the Willow Trees. Scary as an evening alone with this record may be, one suspects it'd be less chilling than spending it with its creator.

MAGNET Magazine
...[She] infuses warmth into her dark ballads and sylvan shanties. (That and she handles her own guitar, ukelele, five-string banjo, organ, etc.) On her lovely debut, last year's Ballads of Living and Dying, Nadler avoids a pretentious chill even when retooling Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee" or submerging herself in the drowning death of Virginia Woolfe. With the Saga of Mayflower May, the literary references aren't as obvious (the songs follow her alter ego, Mayflower May, through various quests), but Nadler's erudite melancholy and knack for wraith-like melody is even more distinctive. (Think of Neko Case swarthed in black). Despite her dusky aesthetic, she fills the songs with color: the almost upbeat strumming of "Yellow Lights" finds the protagonist "drinking rubies in the rain," while the narrator issues the warning, "Oh, Mary, don't you die/"Cause of the color of her eyes." Ominous closer, "Horses and Their Kin," complete with ghostly choir, talks of silver trees and a yellow moon amid a raging fire. There's freak folk or new-weird whatever, and then there's Nadler's gothic tinged folklore and crystalline choruses, which could've been penned centuries ago by Poe's lost maidens in crumbling mansions. Or, judging from Nadler's cover photo, perhaps Ophelia is a better fit. - Brandon Stosuy

Absolutepunk.net

The Saga of the Mayflower May runs it course like an elongated dream. The quiet solitude that permeates the album slowly surrounds the listener, as Nadler carefully leads the way through the darkness. It can be haunting at times, as in the oddly unsettling and eerie backings on “Horses and Their Kin” where Nadler meshes with the high backing vocals in a wash of reverb. The addition of some small, but effective, elements adds to the moodiness of the album and can elevate the expressiveness as well. When it comes to this carefully constructed brand of emotional folk, Marissa Nadler still delivers a dreamlike meshing of sadness and reflection.

Dusted Magazine

...This urgency carries into the album’s finale, “Horses and Their Kin”, a fevered dream cast in the moonlight of the Salem woods. The tinny guitar notes race forward, her voice tangling with a wind-whipped moan of vocal harmony. The song is neither as rigorous or rhythmic as “Annabelle Lee”, but it’s every bit as hauntingly macabre, boasting a quality of immediacy that can, at times, be absent in Nadler’s straight-backed folk. When it’s there, few in the New Folk clique can rival her bewitching talent.

Brainwashed.com
I have been forced to part company with all the other new folk songstresses, as there is no room in my world now for anyone but Marissa Nadler, whose voice is so lovely and bewitching that it spins me senseless until I find myself wandering aimlessly in a dark wood with no clue how to get home. Her voice is mysterious and enchanting, whispery and fragile, but also enunciative and matronly, seductive but elegiac. I can detect shades of Hope Sandoval or Elizabeth Fraser, perhaps, but also darker strains of Linda Perhacs or The Trees' Celia Humphries. But just when you think that Marissa Nadler's voice is just a gentle, lilting, massaging instrument, there comes a coarse little edge of Anne Briggs and Shirley Colllins, but when you try to grab hold, she has receded further into the forest, and her voice echoes off of the canopy of trees and disappears into the wilderness. The Saga of Mayflower May is Ms. Nadler's second album, and it's vaguely conceptual, with each song a different chapter in a cloth-bound book of murder ballads, the kind decorated with pressed flowers and handwritten love letters. The lyrics are a glorious collection … full of turquoise-colored eyes of lovers, fields of green and skies of azure, and spoilt maidens silently bleeding to death beneath wild weeping willows, or drowned in rivers by scorned suitors. The fact that her songs play on such familiar lyrical themes works to Ms. Nadler's advantage, as it seems she is pulling from some vast collective unconscious archive of British and Appalachain folk ballads, which makes the emotional impact of the music quite stealthy. I was almost lulled into complacency when "Damsels in the Dark" began, and I was rudely awakened by its spooky refrain: "Photographs of your face, against the wind/Against the rain, I'm gonna burn them all/And bury your name." Marissa plays all of the guitars, including 12-string and ukelele, and is joined on a few tracks by Brain McTear and Nick Castro… There are moments of pure hypnotic beauty on this record, when just at the appropriate time, Marissa's vocals are multitracked and overlaid, creating richly evocative harmonies, a chorus of forest witches answering each lyric with spine-tingling echoes. What I really respond to in Marissa Nadler's music is… its lack of pretension and self-conscious kookiness... I have spun The Saga of Mayflower May more than any other album I've gotten lately, and I'm far from ready to take it out of my player. - Jonathan Dean