Nadia Reid
Enter Now Brightness
★★★★
CHRYSALIS
“I would like to go to Canada/I have never been before,” sang Nadia Reid on her third album, 2020’s Out Of My Province, quietly tipping her hat to her inner Joni Mitchell. “All of the travelling I have done/I don’t know what I’m looking for.” Since making that record with the assistance of Virginia’s Spacebomb crew, there have been deep shifts in the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s life – the birth of two daughters, a move to the UK – the kind of changes that suggest new roots, new foundations.
The anxiety and sadness that shivered under her first two albums, 2015’s Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs, and 2017’s Preservation, has largely evaporated from Enter Now Brightness, but it doesn’t mean Reid’s wandering days are entirely over. There’s a questing robustness to these songs, a sense of somebody finally having the perspective to seek out answers to long-hanging questions.
There are similarities with Laura Marling – not least Reid’s Short Movie-style vocal skips and catches on Cry On Cue – but this record isn’t quite as in-the-room about her domestic situation as Marling’s motherhood-inspired Patterns In Repeat. While there are lots of references to light in these songs, Reid rarely deals in sudden flashes of revelation. Her writing is more diffuse, allusive, hinting at the power of love, the damage of the past, the complex tangles of family. “I can’t help but keep a lookout,” she sings over Tom Healy’s cradling acoustic guitar on Even Now, suggesting a constant vigilance built in from harder times. Send It Down The Line, meanwhile, recognises the kind of psychic debris that can clutter a person’s internal hard drive: “cannot fix a problem that ain’t mine,” she sings with quiet force, before declaring “here I am”.
There’s a baseline confidence here, then, that has moved from the subtle dread-bearing songs of her earlier work. The mood is still serious – Baby Bright is driven by slow horns, their stately rise and fall giving an almost post-rock edge to Reid’s composite tale of suicide and redemption. Yet she also relies on ’80s power-ballad nostalgia for the man-handson-misery-to-man meditations of Changed Unchained, or wind-in-hair drivetime euphoria on Hotel Santa Cruz. “Now I can be kind to everyone,” she declares on Hold It Up’s languid country slide, finally in a good – if complicated – place.
“Holy” is another word that crops up frequently in these songs, a trace of Reid’s quest to give meaning to the everyday, to elevate her life. “There is dust settling inside me,” she sang on Out Of My Province’s High & Lonely. The songs on Enter Now Brightness, however, suggest no dulling of Reid’s songwriting senses, just an acute desire to keep moving closer to seeing the light. Heaven is out there; Canada can wait.
Enter Now Brightness in out February 7 on Chrysalis.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
TRACKLISTING:
Emmanuelle
Cry on Cue
Baby Bright
Hold It Up
Changed Unchained
Second Nature
Even Now
Hotel Santa Cruz
Woman Apart
Send it Down the Line
Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new albums, reissues, music books and films only in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy HERE!
