This is the first time I've actually successfully sat through an entire Nadja album. They definitely made delivering kebabs and pizza an ethereal experience, I can say that much. Numbness is like many other releases in the sizeable Nadja catalogue; ridiculously fuzzy, enormously slow, miserable yet hopeful and just a little bit pretentious. Numbness offers (to me) nothing new; it is simply Nadja for Nadja's sake. Depending on how much you like Nadja, you may or may not be in for a treat. If you're secretly hoping for the band to mix it up a little bit from the usual template, then you might as well uncross your fingers now. This duo are the Agathocles of the 'slow and moody' universe.
This isn't to say that Numbness is a particularly bad album - it's actually very enjoyable - it's just that it genuinely baffles me how Nadja can release so much of this stuff sounding all the same yet still be able to craft new and genuine songs from it? Surely there is only so much you can do with a drum kit, a synth that apparently plays only one note and a bass guitar that sounds like radio static pumped through a sunn O))) amplifier. At times songs resemble something altogether more Jesu, and others sound almost like Merzbow fell asleep on the lower-end of a keyboard. Closing track "Numb", which builds slowly and with menacing purpose, was set to be my favourite track, until some crazy effect on the drums kinda ruined it for me.
Honestly don't know what to make of this. Really on the fence with Nadja. Guess I just gotta be in the mood to listen to them, which is very, very rare. If you know and love what Nadja is all about though, you'll fucking love this.
PS - after listening to this I found out that this is actually a fucking BEST OF compilation! (??????). I think it's safe to say I'm done with Nadja for the foreseeable future)
No comments:
Post a Comment