'Get Z to a Nunnery' Review: Z Berg is back with the perfect gothic soundtrack for the end of the world
Elizabeth Anne 'Z' Berg, or simply Z Berg is all set to make her return with her latest album, 'Get Z to a Nunnery', out on July 10. The record features numerous guests including Ryan Ross, Ethan Gruska, Phoebe Bridgers, Madison Cunningham and Blake Mills, and sees Z Berg take yet another detour from her previous sound. This time it is in favor of a style that truly allows her artistry to shine through.
Z Berg's acid wit and preternatural talent fueled her first band, teenage girl-group, The Like, who made wistfully-dreamy new-wave and spiky mod-pop, anchored by Berg’s world-weary romanticism and fierce intelligence. They began at the tender age of 15 and toured with everyone from The Strokes and The Arctic Monkeys to Phoenix, Dinosaur Jr, Muse and Maroon5. They traveled the world like a feral street gang, leaving behind blood-stained bobby pins and a trail of reverb.
The band would work with Wendy Melvoin (of Prince and the Revolution) and Mark Ronson before their untimely demise. Berg followed her stint in The Like with another in Phases, an exercise in pure pop exuberance formed with a group of dear friends including Alex Greenwald (of Phantom Planet) and Jason Boesel (of Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes). With each act, Berg demonstrated her willingness to experiment and her ability to reinvent sound over and over again. And with her upcoming solo record, 'Get Z to a Nunnery', Berg makes yet another departure from her previous work, opting for a more raw and stripped-down representation of her writing and allowing you to really see what it has always been.
'Get Z to a Nunnery' is described by the artiste as "...a sort of gothic-romantic femme-fatale folk record; it’s chamber-pop with a bit of grit and a healthy dose of tragedy. It’s a little bit Francoise Hardy... a little bit Dusty Springfield on drugs... a little bit Nico without them. It feels like dusting off a forgotten gem from another time, like the almost unimaginably late discovery of Nick Drake, Linda Perhacs, or Scott Walker."
Berg's album is an interesting and rather unclassifiable one. It's slow and smooth, dark and edgy, evocative and breezy, all at once. It has moments that reveal a deep resignation to the repetitive patterns we are often stuck in, and to that end, can be extremely haunting at points. But the piano-led record and Berg's gorgeous vocals also lend a sense of peace to these songs. It’s a quiet and ethereally beautiful presentation of pain, with psychedelic ASMR pocket symphonies that document the scars left by wildness and love and death and drugs and loss and growing up much too fast. The album ends with 'The Bad List', a tragic, autobiographical Christmas duet with longtime musical collaborator Ryan Ross, followed by a haunting 'Epilogue'.
Every aspect of Berg’s world is an exercise in tearing down walls, making everything she does feel like a fever dream and perhaps sometimes like an insidious, slowly-creeping fever-nightmare. 'Get Z to a Nunnery' is as much of a record as it is a mission statement. It is the end of an era and the beginning of another, marked by a collection of songs written over the course of chaotic years that, for Berg, always seemed like borrowed time. To that end, it blends wistful tragedy with graceful unease, listless love with resigned existential dread, and from that space she creates a record that beautifully encompasses the moment. Or, as Berg tells it, 'Get Z to a Nunnery' is "the perfect soundtrack to the end of the world".