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Critically-acclaimed singer-songwriters Marissa Nadler and Alela Diane showcased their considerable musical talents at DC9 on Tuesday night, captivating an attentive audience with intimately stripped-down sets of folk songs.
Hailing from the erstwhile gold rush town of Nevada City, CA (an apparent musical hotbed, it has also produced Joanna Newsom and Mariee Sioux), Diane alternated between a selection of songs off her latest release, To Be Still, as well as from her older records. Though she was joined on several songs by bassist Tom Bevitori, Diane carried much of the set alone on vocals and guitar, finger-picking intricate yet understated arpeggios that left ample room for her expressive vocals to take center-stage. On songs like "White As Diamonds," Diane's voice ranged expansively from country-tinged twang to bluesy lamentations to bluegrass-flavored near-yodels, as her songs vividly evoked Western landscapes and the stories of those who have inhabited them.
Featuring material from her current record, Little Hells, Nadler's headlining set was also a largely solo-acoustic affair, though she was accompanied at times by electric guitarist Carter Tanton of the band Tulsa. Despite her extensive experience as a touring musician, Nadler confessed to suffering from habitual stage fright, and her first several songs indeed sounded a bit tentative before she hit her stride with the mesmeric guitar drones and hauntingly beautiful mezzo-soprano vocals of "Dying Breed," from her 2007 album, Songs III: Bird on the Water.
Compared to Diane's more rustic and atavistic aesthetic, the music of the D.C.-born Boston resident songs displayed more contemporary dynamics and a palpably darker tone. Aptly described earlier this week here on DCist as "perpetually morose," Nadler cited a specific cause for Tuesday night's melancholia: she had apparently broken up with her boyfriend earlier in that day, which she told the audience immediately before launching into a plaintive rendition of "Oh, Lonesome Me," a Don Gibson song famously covered by Neil Young on After the Gold Rush. Nadler's disclosure lent an extra note of autobiographical urgency to the themes of love, loss, loneliness, and death that pervade her music, and her songs seemed rawer in emotional tenor from being stripped of their studio arrangements. Fittingly, Nadler's performance concluded with a cover of Jackson C. Frank's folk-classic, "Blues Run the Game," on which she was joined by tourmates Diane, Tanton, and Bevitori as she sang "Wherever I have played, the blues have run the game."
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