Queller

This is both an interesting, and kind of disappointing release.

Basically, this is undoubtedly the most accessible Nadja album out of the last.. I dunno, the last 60 odd. Since the cover album. The fuzz is relatively restrained, the songs- quite normal. Relatively short even (by Nadja standards).

It's a good thing, because there's no horrible parts where aimless, amelodic drones stretch out for a painfully long time. At the same time, the best Nadja moments- and there's quite a lot of them, Thaumogenesis, Skin Turns to Glass, Touched 2007, the Black Boned Angel collabs and so on and so forth- the best Nadja moments are when things are utterly huge while still maintaining an obvious coherence and vision; when rolling around in a huge amniotic sac of buzzing bliss is a life sustaining joy. That's not really here, and it's a shame.

Still, it's not a bad album. It's cool seeing Aidan and Leah build songs out of simple clean lines, before turning on a few pedals and building walls of noise. There's a tendency towards more noisy post-punk sort of riffs here I guess, which has worked before (Dagdrom) and works pretty well here too. Most songs start with a clean, fairly simple guitar line and then unfold increasingly over the 10-odd minute running times- kinda reminds me of the way Mogwai did a lot of their debut album. If you slowed Sonic Youth down by a fair bit and gave them a buch of valium you're not too far away. Hell, just imagine Nadja covering Young Team. This is hardly the life changing, monsoon-front fuzz fest that was Memory Leak, there's none of the brilliant riff sets of Icelight, it's not monstrously heavy Flowers of Flesh, but it's still pretty enjoyable.

All up my feelings are very much like hearing Metallica's Death Magnetic. Queller is very much like their best stuff, or at least it wants to be. It's not as good as their best stuff, and suffers in comparison to it, buuuut taken on it's own merits it's still a fairly decent album. It's probably not something I'll be playing in ten years time, but I certainly enjoyed listening to it the 5 or 6 times prior to writing this review. Certainly recommended if you're a fan.