Marissa Nadler x Gorilla vs. Bear takeover: cemetery breeding

[image via marissa nadler's instagram]

It's been over a decade since we first fell in love with the music of Marissa Nadler -- sometime around the moment I first heard her flawless "Diamond Heart", which remains one of my favorite songs of all time -- and I distinctly remember the thrill of discovery every time she'd upload one of her exquisite and still underrated cover songs on myspace. So it goes without saying that we're very honored to have her take the reigns of the site on this, the release date of her gorgeous and haunting seventh album Strangers. Stick around throughout the day as Marissa shares some of her favorite music and art, starting with this post on the new Black Mountain record:

I recently got home from a West Coast tour with Vancouver/ Los Angeles based Black Mountain. My favorite song that they played each night was “Cemetery Breeding.” Their latest album, the heavy and beautiful IV, was produced by Randall Dunn, who has worked on my last two albums, Sunn O))) to name a few. As COS says, “Black Mountain have become more capable than ever of transmuting their kaleidoscopic visions into a volcanic unison.”

In “Cemetery Breeding,” Stephen McBean photographically recounts a lustful night with a past lover in a graveyard, zeroing in on that intangible feeling of young love so succinctly that you can feel yourself transported through your own vivid memory portals, skin to skin on the cold ground. The sincerity is what makes this song so good; It’s not easy to pull off a lyric like “fucking in the graveyard” with such gravitas. Amber Webber’s gorgeous harmonies are the cosmic icing here, thankfully mixed to be a counterpart and not a background vocal, giving identity (at least in my mind), to the ghostly female presence being recounted here. It’s been a long time since I went on tour with a band I loved this much. I’m a big fan of “Space To Bakersfield” as well. (IV is out now on Jagjaguwar) -- Marissa Nadler