Nina Winder-lind - Wild Love Review

Wild Love is poetic, impassioned, imperfect but all the better for it.

Nina Winder-Lind’s Wild Love is unstuck in time. So was the debut album by her group The New Eves, one of last year's best records, a hauntological sprawl of creaking psychedelic folk re-interpreted via proto-punk’s driving pulse. Like that record, Wild Love points towards the past, abandoning easy revivalism in its search for something new in the ancient. Wild Love doesn’t sound old so much as it sounds like it was made years before. As if it’s been hidden away somewhere amongst the compilation tapes in the back of a dust-covered record store. It’s hard to place the date; it’s more that it’s just always been there. The sort of thing you listen to and feel implacable even as it burrows its way inside of you.

Part of that is in its raw sonics. The mix of dramatic pianos, chiming organs, brass blasts and glammy guitar riffs leaves an almost viscous quality. It sounds like a seventies songwriter record in its mixture of the ornate and flawed. Like Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man, Winder-Lind’s suite of songs has been rendered uncanny by the layers of their composition. Producer Jack Ogborne hasn’t so much brought the tracks to life as dislocated them from a clear point in time, leaving them to lie in a unique mix of the urban and pastoral. The ornate arrangements and layers of instrumentation exist in an odd symbiosis with their folky origins.

These songs capture clear sensations: busy streets at the onset of night, minuscule churches reverberating with hymns, friends over for dinner. The album's varied yet consistent instrumental palette intertwines these different settings and scenes, rendering them through Winder-Lind’s eyes. If the core of poetry is, as Rimbaud said, a matter of presenting the poet's unique perception, then Winder-Lind is an excellent guitar poet. Her unique vocal tones and loose jammy songs stumble in and out of action with the grace of a ballerina drunk on love. It all leads to an incredibly idiosyncratic sound. One that’s further masked by the warm haze of Ogborne’s production, which leaves them wild and warm.

Winder-Lind is a poet after all, having published her debut collection Röd Ska Jag Leva only last year, so it’s tempting to view her solo work as an extension of that art form. The songs do bear clear influence from the likes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed. Two fellow poets whose canons can be read as attempts to expand the potential of poetry through the conduit of rock ‘n roll. And these songs are poetic, at once tender and wild-hearted, conversational then mythical, littered with carefully placed yet fleet-footed imagery and metaphors. But encapsulating Wild Love as an entirely poetic work is to ignore its sound. Despite lacking the New York grit of Reed or Smith, Winder-Lind shares their perspective of the electric guitar as a sonic guide for the poet’s thread.

Across these songs, the guitar is Prometheus. A giver of fire and freedom, which lifts the songs into the stratosphere. It doesn’t do this through heavy ambience or distortion; it's more wistful than that. You can hear it in the glimmering guitar riff which cuts through ‘Girls’ heavy strings. The way the solos on ‘Grandma & Robert De Niro’ clash with its jaunty yet mournful piano ballad to unearth joys aching under the melodies. The way it weaves in and out of ‘You’re Not An Angel’ like a thunderclap, the guitar a sonic actualisation of the song's titular realisation.

The guitar only really takes the lead when Winder-Lind is at her most emotionally direct. It rips across the crunching proto-punk of ‘Headfirst’ through a series of glammy riffs. It builds delicately with synths and weepy horns on ‘Everything Is About You’, guiding the song to its slow release. It’s not so much that these songs are built around the guitar that the guitar unearths their meanings. It’s something Winder-Lind seems to confirm on the soaring closer ‘Foremothers’ as she sings ‘I played electric guitar for you/For you my grandmother/and your mother/and her mother/and her mother’. Across that final track's screeching waves of solos, Winder-Lind lays down the album's thesis. The ability of music to not just shake oceans and open worlds, but to capture the quieter moments, the moments of unspoken love and intimacy, and expand them.

Winder-Lind’s songwriting doesn’t feel universal. It's far too soaring, dramatic, and personal to be universal. Some moments are stronger than others, while Winder-Lind formats her verse through several ideas and styles, not all of them feel fully accomplished. But still, it’s hard not to admire the ambition and courage at the core of the record. It’s rare to hear such a full-blooded slab of singer-songwriter tracks that don’t either drown themselves in maximalism or rely on intimacy to write off imperfections as earnestness. Like her work with The New Eves, Winder-Lind has crafted something that feels old and primal but never retro or revival. Wild Love is poetic, impassioned, imperfect but all the better for it. A reminder that within the old tones of the electric guitar still lurks the potential for true poetics.