Music > Live Reviews

Nina Nastasia

Norwich Arts Centre

09/09/23

This was a mesmerising performance by a completely singular artist. Accompanied by acoustic guitar, except on the incredible acappella opening song, Nina Nastasia appeared to effortlessly hold the audience’s attention throughout a set packed with beautifully constructed songs whose subject matter was often extraordinarily harrowing.

The combined strength of the songs, and Nastasia’s remarkable singing, had a strangely disorientating effect on me. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the opening act, Bryde (Welsh singer-songwriter Sarah Howells, formerly of Paper Aeroplanes), who bought to mind Cat Power and Scout Niblett, by the end of the evening, it would have seemed unfair on any support act to be compared to Nastasia’s majestic performance. 

Steve Albini, who has produced several of Nastasia’s albums, has described her debut “Dogs” as a record “so simultaneously unassuming and grandiose that I can’t really describe it, except in terms that would make it (and me) sound silly. Of the couple thousands records I’ve been involved with, this is one of my favourites.” That album was released 23 years ago but ‘so simultaneously unassuming and grandiose’ as to be indescribable feels as apt a summary of her performance at the Arts Centre as it is of her remarkable first album.

When she quickly returns to the stage for an encore, she jokes that she was worried that we would stop clapping. There was as little chance of that happening as there is that I will forget the strange and powerful effect of an incredible evening of beautiful and unsettling music.