Nina Nastasia Dogs / Run to Ruin

The New York singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia released Dogs first time round in 1999. Despite being produced by Steve Albini, and generally well received, the album has been difficult to get hold of and remained unreleased in the UK until now. After wildly enthusiastic reviews for her 2003 outing Run to Ruin (more below) and brief tours to these shores which were similarly lauded, Touch and Go are being kind enough to re-release the 1999 album described by John Peel as "astonishing." Her stocks looks set to rise in the UK further with a tour backed by the Contemporary Music Network for Nina's stable core of backing musicians and the remarkable inclusion of two founding members of the Tuvan band Huun Huur Tu, drafted in to play the igil, a traditional horsehair instrument.

Such innovation gives a sense of Nastasia's musical vision - a feel for melancholic, affecting tunes and subtle, finely conceived lyrics that tell of hubris, missed opportunities and nautical longing. Her voice, similar in many ways to Patti Smith when she's not shouting, is at times soothing, if not seductive, at other moodily threatening. Despite the hand of Mr Albini, Dogs is not an album that rocks out, and despite many smoky intros suggestive of guitar theatrics, it's in the main a quiet and reflective disc that talks to you over a coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes in a Parisian café. Another line from Mr Peel gives a picture of what's going on here: her "songs are very direct without being posy or too clever. There's an attractive air of melancholy without self-pity."

Nevertheless, the lyrical conceits of A Dog's Life, or the addictive tunefulness of Stormy Weather contributes to an album that punches well above its weight. As Albini said, "Dogs is a record so simultaneously unassuming and grandiose that I can't really describe it." Well that's probably why he produces records rather than reviews them, but the tension between understatement and fantastic achievement is remarkable, creating an album that is memorable, hummable, and emotional enthralling. There are also some sublime moments of musicianship from her backing group, in particular an edgy mahogany cello sound that recalls the Auteurs in their pomp. Without being mawkish or populist, Nastasia takes on love and loss in an accessible, provocative, and musically special fashion. 8/10

It's worth mentioning the previously easier to find Run to Ruin, from 2003, a cleverer, more instrumentally complex album, which is at the same time quieter and much sparser. Lyrically it is old-fashioned and modern at the same time, in that curious and very American way mastered by Beck. The effortlessly sticky tunes of Dogs aren't present, but the Bad Seed-style playing offers plenty of compensations for the attentive listener, as on the silent film soundtrack The Body, or the Spender-esque poem On Teasing, a salutatory lesson in man's relationship with nature sung as a sea-shanty with accordions an' all. The album is atmospheric throughout, but is less immediate and catchy than it's predecessor, without wanting to suggest a significant falling off in quality, rather an attempt at fine yet important experimentation, which UK audiences will be able to witness on her June tour. 7/10