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Nadja > Trembled > Reviews > caspian
Nadja - Trembled

Nadja don't suck live!! :O - 85%

caspian, October 27th, 2007

Most bands come into their own live. Sunn O)))'s live gig was easily the heaviest, most mind blowing thing I've ever experienced, Sigur Ros was just jaw dropping and beautiful- hell, even Metallica in '04 were excellent. Of course, some bands have a reputation for fairly crappy shows, whether it's Animal Collective getting random backing tapes and 'improvising' over them, or Jesu's general out of key-ness and awkwardness.

Before hearing this album, I would've definitely put Nadja in the 'crap live bands' list. Nadja's music requires a crazy amount of layers, and the idea of two people noodling around on their instruments and out of key vocals (not sure why, I just always envisioned Baker singing out of key live) didn't seem very appealing to me. Well, why I can still imagine these guys staring at their shoes noodling on their guitars, at least they manage to sound great, which is half the battle.

Indeed, give it a little bit more clarity and this would sound exactly like a Nadja studio album. Except for Buckareff's exceptional bass playing, everything is just hovering around in some middle register cloud, Baker's guitar soaked in delay and a million other effects, the drum machine hovering around in the background, providing some sort of momentum and structure and keeping the whole thing from collapsing in on itself. The music is definitely the most blissed out Nadja's ever done, especially the amazing Swans cover, 'No Cure...' which sounds like Eluvium with lots of fuzz and reverb, and indeed I'm quite surprised by how good Baker does his live vocals. This version of 'Corrasion' is also quite quality, definitely better then the studio versions of it, with Nadja backing off on the noise and creating some more fuzzy Eluvium style ambient/drone. Indeed, a quick description of this album could well be "Eluvium with fuzz".

There's some very high quality fuzzy ambient stuff within this album, no doubt. While recommending yet another Nadja release seems kind of redundant, considering they all sound pretty similar, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. However, this record was an absolute bitch to find, so unless if you're a Nadja freak (like me) it's not really worth tracking down. For a very similar sound, I'd recommend you get Eluvium's Talk Amongst the Trees and play it through a distortion pedal, as that would sound exactly the same.