"I don't feel quite ready to go outside yet."

Nathan Ventura - Coming Home in a Nutcase
Self-released

When an individual is descending into madness and they unburden themself of their most torturous suffering through either the written word or the vocalized word, does it deliver respite? Or has the descent submerged the individual so deeply that light no longer reaches them? When Emily Dickinson wrote "I felt a funeral in my brain," did she fold up her paper, put down her pen, and do the Cupid Shuffle?

I only ask because Nathan Ventura's Coming Home in a Nutcase finds the artist wobbling down a Bell Jar-inspired path toward a total unhinging. The tracks are built on squally and wheezy noises—sounds that could be an old elevator struggling to get you from the lobby to the third floor or the municipal recycling truck using that lift mechanism to pick up your mayonnaise jar-filled bins. Over this the Boston native plays bits of trumpet and with a variety of phrasing that takes the mood from bonkers to bat-shit. Does this make him feel better?

There are spoken-word tracks—if the term "spoken word" can apply to a vocal technique that consists of phrases gathering inside the brain, but not being allowed an immediate departure, so they bottleneck and become a heavy throng until a sudden rush and a push allows them to come spilling forth. This is heard on one track where Ventura stages a phone call to his boss and explains why he isn't at work.

"I don't feel quite ready to go outside yet," he says, which isn't quite as poetic and prismatic as "I felt a funeral in my brain," but effective nonetheless.