Nina Nielsen: Love and Terror in the Wilderness

Nina Nielsen’s six song record is well named. It aims for a feeling of extreme intensity where every whisper, every note, and every word is exposed and meant to feel significant. This is a dangerous tightrope to walk, because one person’s lovely honesty is another’s terrifying tweeness. Equally, while one person may enjoy guitar strings recorded so loud that they whistle, another may prefer fingernails on a chalkboard.

I find these tracks a mixed bag at best. The intimate sparse sound and feeling works well on the crisply paced “No Easy Way Out”, but lyrics about planes falling and dead fish seem a bit pompous. The more relaxed “You Remember The Smell of An Apple Garden” benefits from having a nice tune but suffers from the title line continuing “where your parents made love, before you were born.” The sluggish pace of “Deadringer” and “Premonitions” ground my interest down further. In an age where the voice is too often buried, she leaves hers isolated and naked in the mix; but this necessitates having an interesting voice and something to say. Nielsen’s voice fluctuates between rather good actual singing and a girlish whisper that I found much less appealing especially when it uttered the word “daddy” and my teeth started to ache. I would, though, quite like to hear Nina Nielsen maybe singing some different stories and backed by Svart Greiner.