MP3 | Marissa Nadler — ‘River Of Dirt’

If you’ve already read our preview of Marissa’s upcoming album Little Hells [here], you’re probably itching to hear the whole thing pronto. There’s still a month to go before it’s released but here’s another taster for it.

‘River Of Dirt’ was the first song written for the album and is purposefully more autobiographical than much of Marissa’s character-laden early work, but it’s still deliciously ambiguous in its own way. For instance, when she sings “el Camino take me home”, we’re left unsure as to whether she means El Camino the 1960s muscle car (Brad Pitt drives one in ‘The Mexican’) or the generic Spanish for ‘the road’. The song doesn’t so much rev into gear, rather it starts and rolls consistently along at an energising pace with rhythmic drums and fingerpicked guitar, and it’s left to the lyrics to jump around in time, examining a painful experience from all sorts of vantage points, deliberately left as intriguing snapshots. Marissa is no stranger to the subject of loss, but ‘River Of Dirt’, though truncated in its separate insights, is overall less abstract, more corporeal than some other highlights of Marissa’s back catalogue. You can almost feel the hot dust as it blasts across your forehead, speeding through some unnamed desert with a gnawing feeling that something is wrong, somewhere, and you need to get there fast.

FREE MP3: Marissa Nadler, ‘River Of Dirt’

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