Pitchfork

Nina Nastasia's latest songs are short-- almost stubbed-out. Even the three or four-minuters are pared down to the simplest statement possible, as if she took a pile of short stories and cut them all to that moment where the protagonist decides, "This life isn't working." The recording is bare and Nastasia makes her voice plain-- not in a bad way, but to cut down on frills-- and where she's always sung in low tones, On Leaving finds her singing to an airless, empty room.

Nastasia's first three albums were overtly moody: 2002's The Blackened Air moaned with swamp gothic charm, and 2003's Run to Ruin, her greatest work, took its eight songs in vividly different directions, each track making a significant musical leap. But On Leaving-- Nastasia's first record for Fat Cat-- pulls back on the experimentation. This time the arrangements are bare, with one exception: Every note of Steven Beck's piercingly sentimental piano strikes like pictureframe glass hitting the floor, almost cracking Nastasia's non-reveries. We know she's sad-- that couldn't be clearer-- and the songs work best when they skip to the reasons why: the striking memories of unidentified men in "Jim's Room", or the unsatisfied daydream of "Our Day Trip". And "One Old Woman" stands out like a shout: The only song where she raises her voice, it's also the record's only catharsis.

After Run to Ruin, it's difficult to hear Nastasia pull back to a songwriter-with-guitar style. One longtime listener remarked to me, with some disappointment, that he considers this "a lyrics album." As a smaller, closer record, it's successful. Nastasia has said that she feels most comfortable in the studio, recording pretty much live to tape, and letting each song rest on the record exactly the way it happened. Perhaps thanks again to recording with Steve Albini, it works for her here; even when she's most ambivalent, she's intriguing and immediate. But On Leaving is also closed-off and pensive, and sometimes just plain mopey. Where her last albums felt like they were imperceptibly spreading wings, this time she's stuck on the edge of a decision, and eventually the listener wants to give her a shove.