FEATURE:
My Album Discovery of 2022
Weyes Blood’s Remarkable And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
__________
FOLLOWING her incredible fourth studio album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Koury Angelo (for Under the Radar
2019’s Titanic Rising, many critics recognised thar Weyes Blood (Natalie Laura Mering) was at her creative peak. Could see top such a stunning record that blended ‘70s Soft Rock and a sense of doom. That doesn’t sound like a winning and appealing blend but, the fact that many publications placed the album among their very best of 2019 proves that the album is beautifully judged and resonated widely. This year’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is an album that I missed when it came out earlier this month (18th). A late entry for album of the year, I think that Weyes Blood’s fifth studio album is her best yet! Drawing comparisons to Brian Wilson and Karen Carpenter – in terms of arrangements and vocals respectively -, these are huge names! It has been my discovery of the year. I remember when Titanic Rising came out and being instantly impressed. I am not sure why I let And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow slip under the radar. So much love for it online compelled me to listen. Whilst I have already named my album of the year (Fable’s Shame), And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is up there with Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE and everything out there. I want to follow the format I use for Second Spin and Revisiting… - features where I explore albums underrated that deserve another listen – and bring in some interviews and reviews. There are more than enough positive reviews for And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow for me to choose from.
There has been a lot of critical fascination around Weyes Blood and the mesmeric And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. It is likely to be included in the end of year top ten critical lists next month. Before getting to a couple of other interviews, I want to take a few sections from FADER’s fascinating chat. There were some really deep and intelligent questions where Weyes Blood (Natalie Mering) provides real insight and compelling answers:
“Mering’s singular sense of the universe has always permeated her work as Weyes Blood, manifesting in the eerie ambience of her debut album, The Outside Room; the heartbroken melodrama of its follow-up, The Innocents; and the lonely tableau of Front Row Seat to Earth. But her vision crystalized on 2019’s Titanic Rising, a near-perfect record that gently laid bare the unsustainability of post-modern human life.
As it turns out, that project was the first in a three-part series whose second volume, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, arrives Friday. Much like its predecessor, the new album is unabashedly allegorical, drawing clear threads from personal crises and relationship dramas to the collapse of community and the rise of a self-enforced surveillance state.
“Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats,” Mering writes in a letter to her listeners accompanying the new record. “Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity.”
And yet, despite these overwhelming odds, there is still hope for salvation from the yawning void. “Chaos is natural,” she continues. “But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment.” As long as our hearts continue to glow toward one another — signals in the endless noise of the cosmos — all is not lost.
The FADER: Two related central concepts to this album are apophenia, the natural human tendency toward pattern seeking, and negentropy, the more universal tendency toward order — the opposite of entropy. Why are those concepts so important to the record?
Weyes Blood: We’re living in a chaotic time, and it’s important to know that chaos is just a part of the equation — that there are also ecosystems of interdependent things that live in harmony with each other, and that they exist just as much as the chaos. They’re two sides of a coin, and it’s very easy to get lost in the chaos and forget about the negentropy. Apophenia, I think, is just a natural human tendency. I don’t know if it’s a major theme on the record, but I’d say it’s just a good word for people to know about when they start to get a little too in their heads about synchronicities.
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow starts with “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” which feels like its mission statement. Our feelings of solitude are universal, but there’s a solution: “Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely.” How can we show mercy to our fellow humans — not on a grand, performative scale but in our private, everyday lives?
We need a place where we can have discourse and conversations about nuanced things. Unfortunately, the internet is not the most fabulous place to do that. There’s just too much anonymity. People can come out of nowhere and say something hateful, and it’s functioning within really specific algorithms. We’re all living within algorithms that don’t necessarily serve a greater purpose besides perpetuating what they’re good for.
PHOTO CREDIT: Neelam Khan Vela
In your own life, do you feel generally confident in your ability to separate signal from noise?
No, because they’re so interwoven now. You never know when you’re getting your head invaded. I use social media for work, to keep people abreast of what I’m doing in a way that feels healthy for me. I’m not oversharing or feeling I constantly have to be on display, but every once in a while I’ll see something that affects the way I process my mood in such a weird way. It’s a very artificial invasion that happens so frequently, especially with the Instagram algorithm. The ads and the posts they show you, it’s like they can tell what the spiciest chili pepper is. And then, all of a sudden, you’re down a rabbit hole that you didn’t want to be down.
I don’t think anybody is fully exempt from the parasitic qualities of [social media]. I like to think I live a pretty righteous existence, but I’m just like everybody else. I don’t think anybody goes on there and doesn’t have some kind of weird moment of having to see something or feel something they didn’t need to see or feel that day. It feels artificial because it’s not something we’ve included in other experiences in the past, but it’s becoming so much a part of our lives every day now that maybe it’s the [modern] equivalent of walking to the store and having somebody elbow you.
There’s a whole new set of rules, and we’re still evolving, figuring out how to protect our mental health within that. If a comment section was a room of people, it would obviously be very different. It creates a whole new kind of agoraphobia: As opposed to being scared to leave your house, you’re scared to dive into the cesspool of our new form of communication.
PHOTO CREDIT: Neelam Khan Vela
The Forty-Five interviewed Weyes Blood about an album that is about the end of the world, and yet it is not a carbon copy of Titanic Rising. They mentioned an inherent darkness in the music, though there are loads of different textures and layers that make it such a wonderful and compelling listen. It is what I am calling my album ‘discovery’ of 2022, as it slipped me by but I have since come to love it and place it among my favourites:
“Mering was raised in a born-again Pentecostal Christian household, but she became sceptical of her family’s belief system in early adolescence, and she was vocal about it.
“I tried to get [my parents] on board with me,” she remembers. As she got older, she came to accept her family’s faith. “I never felt like they were the evil side of religion, you know? More like the communal side.”
Does her Pentecostal upbringing, with its inherent Biblical focus on the Apocalypse, factor into her fixation on the end times?
“Maybe,” she ponders. “But I also feel like the reason I talk about dystopia is because, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve just witnessed so many things shift and change faster than the public discourse can fully keep up with it.”
While modern dystopia is the primary inspiration for Mering’s thematic focus, she credits her rearing for igniting other fascinations. “I think my parents just kind of made me believe in things unseen… In some ways, Born Again Christianity is kind of New Agey in that way.”
She expands, “I feel like I took away an appreciation for stuff that’s beyond the logical explanation of things, and leaving space for there being something more beyond our scope of understanding. Because I do think that we have a very limited understanding of the universe. And I think a lot of philosophies and esoteric thinkers – they do eventually kind of come to that conclusion that the more wise you get, the more you kind of realise that you don’t know anything. So yeah, I think there’s a bit of that that I’ve carried on with me.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Neelam Khan Vela
While she eventually came to understand her parents’ point of view, it took some time for them to appreciate Mering’s artistry when she got involved in Portland, Oregon’s underground experimental noise scene in the late-aughts, including her stint in a band named Satanized.
“I started out playing folk shows – just me and acoustic guitar unplugged, [singing] really pretty folk songs. But it just felt like, at that time, noise was the frontier of new music… I discovered how exciting it was and then kind of got addicted to it, and eventually blended the two. I’d play my acoustic folky music with noises behind it, you know? And then it became Weyes Blood, what it is now.”
Her parents – both musicians themselves – didn’t get it in the early days. “They didn’t really like my music very much,” she remembers, “so I don’t think they wanted me to do it. There was not a lot of support.”
But they came on board as her music began to shift toward the expansive psychedelic indie folk rock for which she’s now known. They saw her play in “a real venue with a real sound system and a real audience” on the supporting tour for 2014 album ‘The Innocents’. “I think when they saw that I did have a music career, indeed, that was real, they were relieved and really impressed.”
Mering’s celestial voice draws frequent comparisons to Karen Carpenter, and the melodies on her last album recall another artist for whom mysticism loomed large: George Harrison. But despite sounding like she could have been plucked out of the ‘70s singer-songwriter and psychedelic movements, Mering continues to be deeply inspired by experimental noise music. But she acknowledges, “for the most part, I just was always better at making beautiful music versus harsh, loud, angry music”.
I would also advise people to read the Pitchfork interview too. I want to spotlight two that caught my eye. This is what DIY had to offer about one of this year’s absolute best albums of the year, from an artist who always makes such unbelievable music:
“Natalie Mering’s first record in three years as Weyes Blood can be summed up perfectly by opening track ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’. The cumbersome album title ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ belies its backdrop too – Natalie is interested in a communal response to a universal trauma. There’s no prizes for guessing what she’s referring to, but the way in which she addresses it is fascinating. She takes an abstract view, focusing on the idea of each of us as a beacon in the darkness, speaking out into the void without knowing if there’ll be an echo. The music is the same gorgeous blend of folk-rock in the vein of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks as on previous albums, and indeed, many of the song titles, such as ‘Children of the Empire’, feel lifted from the dusty cover of a forgotten LP of ballads. Ultimately, Natalie reaches a joyous conclusion – it’s love that matters, after everything else falls away. The album ends on two words that sum up her philosophy: “love everlasting”. It may be dark, but Weyes Blood is still aglow”.
I will finish with NME’s five-star review of the sublime And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. This is an album that provided me a fonder appreciation of Weyes Blood:
“According to Natalie Mering – who makes music as Weyes Blood – the heart is like a glowstick. “You crack it and it glows,” she told The Guardian last month while reflecting on the saintly sleeve of ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’. “It’s about the power of having your heart so broken that it would emanate a light.”
The LA-based artist, who played in a series of underground noise bands before releasing her solo debut in 2011, says her fifth album is the second part of a musical triptych. 2019’s breakthrough ‘Titanic Rising’ formed the first panel: a grandly wrought forecasting of all-encompassing doom, it was filled with sprawling orchestral arrangements and painful, beautiful songs about the impending crumbling-down of life as we knew it then. Though Mering could hardly have foreseen the life-altering events that would unfold the following year – a pandemic which exposed and deepened the already-festering wounds of inequality – the record’s eerie prescience drew from a hellish landscape of fallen trees and surging floods. “Everyone’s broken now and no one knows just how,” she sang on ‘Wild Time’, a stand-out track that recalled the classic songwriting of Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’.
Drawing on that similar songwriting palette and bright, uneasy chamber pop, ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ finds itself in the eye of a whirling tornado; the isolation that its predecessor predicted now fully upon us. Just as sunsets become infinitely more beautiful when they’re pumped full of sun-refracting pollutants, Mering’s own vision of the end of the world is intricately woven and rich with melody, even as loneliness aches at the core. “Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely,” she sings on opener ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’, a tender and sad ode to shared sorrow. ”Has a time ever been more revealing that the people are hurting?” Here, the world does not fall explosively to pieces under a billowing mushroom cloud or wayward meteor; its disintegration is subtler and harder to detect as we all drift steadily apart. As in Skeeter Davis’ 1962 country-pop classic ‘The End Of The World’ or Matt Maltese’s more contemporary epic ‘As the World Caves In’, for Mering the real beauty of the world comes from the people who love each other within it. When these connections are broken apart, the real end times begin.
Written while Mering was locked down in LA with her dog Luigi, ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ deftly avoids touching on the pandemic directly with clumsy references that would rapidly date. Instead, a vaguer, more ominous sense of isolation casts a shadow over the whole record, though the ache of loss is quickly met by an urgent longing for togetherness. Mering’s apparent take on heartbreak seems to be quietly optimistic: a broken heart being a symbol that somebody was vulnerable enough, bold enough, brave enough to open themselves to pain in the first place.
On both the opening track’s exploration of collective pain and the twinkling centrepiece ‘Hearts Aglow’, the bonds that do remain offer a flicker of hope. “It’s been a death march, the whole world is crumbling,” Mering sings on the latter, a swooning, ‘70s-flecked number. “Oh baby, let’s dance in the sand”. She also examines where this hunger to find meaning through others stems from in the first place: “We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve,” Mering explains in a letter written to accompany the record.
‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ raises more questions than solutions, but the nearest thing to an answer possibly lies in the spellbinding ‘God Turn Me Into A Flower’. Here, Mering retells the myth of Narcissus – a Greek hunter who falls in love with his own reflection – and gently touches upon themes of technology and online individualism in the process. “You see the reflection, you want it more than the truth… but the person on the other side has always just been you,” she sings. After a lifetime of staring at his rippling likeness, Narcissus transforms into a bright yellow daffodil swaying in the breeze, slowly spinning to face the sun. By being pliable, open and more tender, Mering seems to suggest, perhaps we can save ourselves from the doom that this stunning record finds itself gripped within”.
My discovery and late runner for album of the year, Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is one that I would recommend to everyone. I know that it will bane named among the best albums of a year that has seen such enormous quality and consistency. I wonder where Weyes Blood will head…
FOR album number six.