a review by Nat Bourgon
May 29th, 2015
"The Way it Feels" is the most impactful, transporting, and wise album of 2015 so far. It is also the most immaculate, truest illustration of Heather Nova's musical and poetic forte. It channels the bay of life's sea that counts most: interpersonal connectivity. The love landscape is gauged, and reflected upon with a detailed precision previously only made available to us via thermometer readings. Since her last dalliance with major labels in 2001, Heather Nova has been sailing further and further down the gulf of her own artistic acumen and originality, being led more and more by her own inclinations and muses. The last decade plus has seen her make records with an increasing sense of sophistication and depth, while conversing her instrumental decor, sonic playfulness and penchant for swivelling simple language around to get to the heart of the matter. "The Way it Feels" finds Heather Nova triumphantly tuning out the cyclone's pull, as she tunes completely into the winds of her curious, enlivened soul's fluctuating disposition. The record is one that is allegiant to truth and reality, without relinquishing thirst and vibrancy. Heather Nova's greatest strength, as especially evident throughout this new record, is her ability to gift ordinariness with a new set of legs. She makes ordinariness feel as though it has been reborn, with the chance to don a smashing cap and gown one day at its graduation ceremony. "The Way it Feels" prefers to leave an overt, candid stain when it comes to emotive events, instead of an undetectable, underlying scrape. Heather Nova embraces change: She treats stains as alterable, removable entities. "The Way it Feels" goes further with this thread and envisions strains as facilitators of new dreams. "The Way it Feels" is the new apex of Heather Nova's storied career, as it is implanted with little bits of cartilage from her previous works, yet it sounds like a sparkling new creation much more than a compound of her historically celebrated endowments. With the eerie, amiss synergy of "Oyster" in tow, along with traces of the lyrical temperament that endured us to "Siren", facets of the melancholic, bare bone arrangements of "Storm" and pockets of the intensity of the introspective songwriting achievements that came through in "Redbird" and "300 Days at Sea", yet flushed with a topical, novel vibe that touches the gut's sweet spot, "The Way it Feels" is Heather Nova's most suasive offering of songs to date. Fitted in production choices that land her in the most seemly compromise imaginable between her indie-like, DIY vision and her big league talents, and containing the most memorable storytelling and personal postscripts I've heard this year, Heather Nova's "The Way it Feels" is an applause garnering tour guide of feeling itself. The encore rewards here are eternal.
