Release date: April 5th
Record label: Bar None
Genre: Slowcore, sadcore, folk rock, singer-songwriter, jazzy/noire-y indie rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Hannah Marcus is a singer-songwriter who grew up in New York City but eventually made her way to the other side of the United States, ending up in San Francisco in the 1990s. Marcus had been a lifelong musician, but it was in the Bay Area where she found the kind of music she’d end up making in her solo career–long, dramatic, drawn-out folk-indie-rock in the vein of American Music Club and Red House Painters (slowcore, or, as the micro-genre is even more specifically referred to, “sadcore”). From 1994 to 2004, Marcus released five albums and an EP, with assistance from American Music Club drummer Tim Mooney and Mark Kozelek, among others, recorded in San Francisco and Montreal. Most of her records were released by German label Norman Records, although the last couple got a stateside release via Bar None Records, who’ve kept them available digitally in the two decades since the last Marcus solo album. Bar None have also recently put together The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004, a career-spanning digital compilation featuring selections from both the Bar None albums and her earlier, still-unavailable-in-full discography (as well as one previously-unreleased track).
With even her biggest influence–American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel–remaining a cult favorite at best in 2024, perhaps it’s unlikely that Hannah Marcus will receive her proper due, but The Hannah Marcus Years makes a strong case for her to be not just remembered, but actively listened to and studied today. “Indie folk” and “slowcore” are wide-ranging terms, music that can sound like a bedroom or sound like nature–in Hannah Marcus’ hands, it sounds like motels and bars, like half-empty rooms that still somehow feel claustrophobic. Like San Francisco in the 1990s, a city unrecognizable from the thing that’s there now. She is not precisely peerless–in addition to her San Francisco collaborators, the folkier moments of the compilation remind me a bit of Nina Nastasia, and the jazzier ones of the late, great Jenny Mae–but her loneliness is a unique one, soundtracked by a New York art/experimentalist streak and featuring writing that would sound conversational if our conversations were much more interesting and less based in reality.
The Hannah Marcus Years is seventy minutes or so long, made up of fifteen tracks, and roughly in chronological order, opening with all four songs from 1995’s Demerol EP. The Demerol songs are some of the compilation’s biggest highlights–already a remarkable songwriter, the aching piano-led title track, the seedy psychedelia of “Invisible Bird”, and the beautiful folk simplicity of “Vampire Snowman” are all in contention for the best song on here. Marcus’ writing remains strong on the later recordings, with the main difference being an occasional musical expansion–the seven-minute “Coconut Cream Pie” incorporates crawling indie rock into her sound excellently, and “Osiris in Pieces” finds just as much paranoia and discomfort in excess as in intimacy (although songs like “Watching the Warriors” and “Ariel” still keep it simple when the moment calls for it).
The selections from her last solo album, 2004’s Desert Farmers, are also worth singling out–the careening, dizzying heights that Marcus and her collaborators reach on “Hairdresser in Taos” ensure that the song is the single most fascinating moment on the entire compilation, but the nevertheless-still-fairly-heavy exhale of “Laos” and the thin, film-covered “Stripdarts” are both not far behind. Desert Farmers was recorded after Marcus moved back to New York, as was “Blue Daisy”, a previously-unreleased country-folk tune about walking around the city post-9/11–in both cases, Marcus went up to Montreal to record. Despite the change in scenery and therefore backing players, she gathered up a new group (including Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Menuck and Thierry Amar, participants in a decidedly different strain of grandiose underground 90s music) that maintained the continuity of her past releases and, if anything, even breathed a little more life into Marcus’ songs.
Hannah Marcus is still around–she released three albums as one third of The Wingdale Community Singers between 2005 and 2013 (including one on Drag City offshoot Blue Chopsticks), and she currently has a “cajunesque” band called Red Aces and a “noise duo” called Wintersea Playboy. She has also recently become an “olfactory artist”, “exploring scent-inflected sound performances” in New York in Los Angeles in recent years. It seems wrong that her solo albums hadn’t gotten a closer look before now, but it makes more sense when one realizes how busy their architect has been in the years since their creation. Whether or not this compilation begins a wider reevaluation of her music remains to be seen, but at the very least I’m now paying attention to The Hannah Marcus Years. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 