#simon goff

Truthfully, if “Sonnborner/Aten” did just want to recapitulate Nadja’s masterful “drone gaze” sound for the rest of its length it would still be satisfying, but it would be worth wondering why bring that string trio along for the ride. They do surface throughout, but it turns out that it’s not until the song’s 18th minute, possibly when it’s moving into the “Aten” part of the composition, that their presence really becomes central. As the duo sharply recedes, the trio takes center stage, first with a series of overlapping string drones but gradually shifting into a gracefully foreboding, drawn-out series of encounters that sounds more like Rachel’s, or even someone like Ingram Marshall, than what the listener is used to hearing from Nadja. The band’s consistent forays into minimalism and drone, and the way the trio’s contributions kept showing up during the track’s first two phases, prevent this lovely and possibly unprecedented (Nadja and especially Baker are prolific enough it’s hard to keep up and keep track) arrangement from feeling like it was shoehorned in. On future listens the three movements in “Sonnborner/Aten” mesh well, the pleasantly mild shock of where the song goes made up for by the way the whole thing hangs together when you know what’s coming.  

Of course, there’s still another 12 minutes to Sonnborner, and those four briefer songs prove to be no less subtly exploratory in the context of the duo’s work, nor any less interested in the fun of sudden right turns. “Sonnborner/Aten” comes to a halt and immediately the listener is shoved into the frantically pummelling drum machine and rapid grind of the guitars on the wonderfully named “In the Shadow of the Wing of the Thing Too Big to Be Seen” (a title as evocatively suited to Nadja’s music as a whole as any they’ve come up with). Here Baker’s vocals are fleshed out into a harsh growl, tempos (relatively) skyrocket, and parts are as close as Nadja is likely to come to death metal. The closing, slightly more fleshed out “Sunborn (Coda)” returns to a beautifully balanced doom metal palette, this time with the string trio adding color to the statelier riffs found here, but compared to “Sonnborner/Aten”’s beautifully arranged sprawl it still feels brisk and spontaneous.  

Over the years Nadja have tried out and even returned to one approach after another, but they have tended to separate out approaches from one approach to the next. Sonnborner not only tries out a couple, but they never feel like they’re being assembled in a haphazard manner; for Nadja, expansion and refinement seem to be (or to be becoming) simultaneous processes. That dynamic and conceptual variation makes this record not only one of their most approachable, but also ample proof that Nadja still have plenty of tricks up their sleeves.