Skin Turns to Glass

Album Review

Skin Turns to Glass was only Aidan Baker's second album using the Nadja moniker, yet, despite the obviously nascent musical vision at hand (not to mention the fact it wasn't even originally released by a proper record company), it already reveals his astoundingly advanced grasp of recording techniques as a means for sculpting breathtakingly emotional material. Part evanescent audio atmospherics, part thunderous death/doom horror show, the album's three, epic-sized compositions sucked the inspirational marrow from influences like Swans, Earth, My Bloody Valentine, Godflesh, and Sigur Rós, then reprocessed them into entirely new, oftimes unforgettable nightmares. The title track, in particular, produced an avalanche of cinematic images via countless layers of sound, its shimmering, ethereal symphonics hovering over a sheet of quasi-immovable glacial doom bedrock. But the disc's book-ending behemoths, "Sandskin" and "Slow Loss," didn't lag far behind, boasting only slightly less striking ambient metal observations of their own. Unfortunately, the improbably modest circumstances surrounding Skin Turns to Glass' creation automatically condemned it to the purgatory of cult-dom. But a new shot at wider, belated exposure eventually arrived when The End Records approached Baker and his new co-conspirator, Leah Buckareff (who joined two years after its original release, to facilitate live performances) with an offer to re-record and reissue the album in early 2008. As well as entailing the addition of a fourth, untitled (and largely understated) new exercise, this revision affected both the ingredients and duration of the original three movements (purists be forewarned); but its difficult to argue with the still top-notch results — especially given the relative unavailability of the original.