It isn’t often I review a band that isn’t heavy metal that includes a diacritical mark in its name.
This one is there as a pronunciation guide: Neh-Vay-Duh Neh-Vah-Da. It indicates a particularity that carries over to the music itself. Nevāda Nevada wants to be understood, to be paid attention to.
Lead singer Kathryn Musilek was a linchpin in the Iowa music scene, playing with Death Ships and Burn Disco Burn before moving to New York City to work in Entertainment PR.
She writes the songs (“with the loving support of the band”) on this album, so there’s a consistency of style and intent. “We Can Leave” has a scathing directness: “We can leave but he’ll find us and he’ll kill us, no matter where we flee.” Musilek has trained her strong alto over the years to always cut through a dense, buzzing rock mix. (Courtney Love has something like Musilek’s vocal attack but Musilek’s a better singer.)
“The One About The Sky” doesn’t hint at an abusive relationship, it shouts it: “and you interrupt now to knock me down, drag me out and that’s not what we agreed on.” This is as heavy and trauma-driven as Metallica’s more anguished songs, but it’s also a glorious, noisy expression recalling ’90s grunge bands like Soundgarden.
“Loaded” has the throbbing pulse of a Velvet Underground song, anchored in Musilek’s piano. Her relentless ostinatos on this song pair well with the fuzzy guitar. “But I’m the bullets in your gun / And I am loaded” is as poetic as it is menacing. The lyric seems to be the inner monologue of a mass shooter, but the language is indirect enough to be, again, about getting away from an abuser: “I refuse to be tortured by anyone but me.”
“Promise, Romance, Wine” starts with an exquisite string introduction. It’s a love song, but with reservations: “Baby, you were the one in the songs” but also “it’s just problems with drugs and with money make for too many love songs to sing.”
“Trickster” is another ambivalent love song. “So come leave your heart in my hands and go.” The perpetually climbing chords and rhythmic cello counterpoint result in a dramatic denouement when she sings, “Just the thought sends those circling stars round my brow.” That’s a cartoonish image, but sung as Musilek sings it’s emotional and vulnerable.
Musically, Musilek and Nevāda Nevada reflect and refine — as most pop musicians do — the music that they grew up with. They owe as much to Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette as to Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana. Even Elton John is a direct antecedent, as he did what Musilek is doing on piano, rocking hard enough as to compete with loud guitars and drums.
I don’t know if this kind of music is fashionable right now, but I don’t care and I suspect that Nevāda Nevada doesn’t either. What the band does care about is making the songs beautiful, true and so loud you can’t ignore them.
Mini-Profile: Kathryn Musilek
Kathryn Musilek’s adventures as a musician is a common Iowa City story. Someone comes to town for school or work, knocks around the local music scene where the stakes are low enough to try on crazy ideas, make mistakes and record some songs. Then they leave town, gone but not forgotten.
Musilek started out writing songs and playing solo guitar. Her first album was on Ames label Bi-Fi.
“Did I really name an album Ballerina In A Box? But I did,” Musilek said to Little Village over the phone, also recalling her days in Burn Disco Burn. “I got to play bass in that one, which was really nice to do. Something besides singing my most personal, gut-wrenching emotions and putting myself out there so much.”
Other bands ensued like Death Ships (with Record Collector alumnus Dan Maloney). Musilek then moved to New York, “and I decided I was never gonna play music again.” She went to work in PR, representing musical artists at first.
“I started in a big firm working with really famous people, and then I moved into the development side, working on baby bands, trying to get them as much PR as possible,” she said. “Trying to turn people onto new bands was just so much more exciting to me.”
Despite her vow to quit music, she discovered GarageBand on her MacBook — “it doesn’t let you go,” she said — and began writing songs more with keyboard than guitar.
“Getting back to piano has been like such a warm return,” Musilek said. “I played piano from age 5 and up. I was in classical piano competitions and I was very much going on that path. And then I was like, ‘Never mind, I play guitar now.’”
In returning to piano, she has found a new way to play.
“It’s a very physical instrument, and I kind of like that about it. I’m really exerting myself. Emotion, through the act of playing the music, comes through my arms.”
When asked about some of the lyrics in the opening song of Nevāda Nevada’s latest album, Past Life, Musilek replied, “I realize that there are some moments where it sounds a little like the kind of folksy, universal preachy stuff, which isn’t really how I feel. I have a really dark view about the world and how climate change is really just gonna wipe us all out.
“I have a strong belief that destroying our own psyches by putting ourselves through all that constant anxiety and strife and bitching isn’t going to help us either. It’s not going to make us live longer. … That song is also about how we have to accept what’s going on that we can’t control, and then just do a little. And that’s all we can really do.”
About the album as a whole, she said, “it’s about power struggles. So much of it is about white patriarchy, I’m not interested in participating. I’ve been so lucky to create systems and have people around me who are also just so over the patriarchy. That’s truly what [the song] ‘We Can Leave’ is about, the abusive toxic patriarchy.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2023 issue.