Marisa Anderson – Still, Here

Thrill Jockey

After the two recent collaborations in which Marisa Anderson took part, it is now her time to tackle another solo album, and using the momentum from those, has turned inward to articulate her thoughts and emotions at a time when she has been able to play live for the longest period of her career.

Although it is a solo album, there is a wild and welcoming quality to Still, Here that also captures a deep, Badlands clarity that patters restlessly and allows us to focus on the sheer ingenuity of her playing as each track is built up from numerous guitar parts, interlocking and oscillating. Some tones are dry and lonesome, while others drift slow and settled and a keen whine is generated in the far distance.

Her ability to make the guitar cry or to wring from it some extraordinary emotion is lovely. It can be so sorrowful, but with a remorseless, deeper pattern sitting below that prevents things from becoming lachrymose. Two guitars soar around one another like a vision of some clear blue desert sky, with tales of sadness told beneath, related between two dusty travellers passing through, opening their hearts and moving on, never to meet again.

Still, Here is so contemplative and it feels like so much thought has gone into it, but rarely are you able to assume where you will be led next. An exquisitely haphazard piano duets with vibrato guitar at one point and there is a touch of Spanish style to it, giving a borderland feel, that liminal area with the atmosphere still and drawn, hazy yet expectant.

There are hints of fellow travellers; a touch of Calexico in the traditional “La Llorona” evoking adobe buildings and scorching sun, while the more melancholy “Beat The Drum Slowly” is an evolving marvel, hair-raisingly pretty, sharing space with Richmond Fontaine but managing to describe without words a sort of emotional resonance, the guitars at play, warming the heart and changing the patterns that travel above us.

The eight pieces on Still, Here last a little over a half hour; but in that time, Marisa takes you in to her heart and tries to impress upon you the beauty that she sees, sometimes entwined with melancholy but always with hope. This is a fine selection and I can’t help wondering in which direction she will be heading next.

-Mr Olivetti-