Nadja - Skin Turns To Glass

When Nadja come on you feel like everything should be moving in slow motion. There are countless oblique ways to describe Skin Turns To Glass without directly saying a word about the music (just to get it out of the way, though, it’s essentially ambient shoegazer metal—from Toronto). We can call it a soundtrack to, say, a gathering storm in the sky, electrical nebulae stunned by heavy interference, dark suns being shattered to pieces by giant hammers, swirling vertigos of dust, uh, flying minotaurs with outspread angel wings? You get the idea. And the idea is what matters here: Nadja are more about mood, sound, and texture than musicality. It’s a force to be reckoned with, though you should probably save your reckoning for a long afternoon because the shortest track on the album runs at 14:25. [Jorge Marticorena]