New to Me, No. 1: The Mellow Gold of Weyes Blood's Titanic Rising

From "Everyday." Solid call-back.

“Yeah, I am a special kind of clown. I make people cry.”

That came at the end of a video interview with Weyes Blood (aka, Natalie Mering) on AMBY (A Music Blog, Yea?), who’s as intelligent and thoughtful there as she is everywhere else. For those who don’t want to take the time to watch that, a reviewer on Pitchfork gets you even closer in one vivid sentence:

“She speaks coolly, even when you sense a surge of passion is running through every word, and her music plays a similar trick.”

I got to Weyes Blood when Spotify fed me Drugdealer’s “Sea of Nothing” (one of your weirder accessible tunes).Mering doesn’t even appear on that track, but her singular contribution on “End of Comedy” and “Suddenly” made both songs work better than the rest of End of Comedy (which I still recommend to the right people). It was the recent release of Titanic Rising (in 2019) and hearing “Everyday” (link below) that finally inspired me to dig in to, what turned out to be a longer than expected story.

Mering was born in Santa Monica, California (and I think she’s California-based now), but she landed in Philadelphia’s “noise rock” scene by way of growing up in a musical household in Pennsylvania – specifically in a band called Jackie O Motherfucker (sample of their more normal: ”Hey! Mr. Sky”) and Nautical Almanac (samples are rarer). While I didn’t hear much of Jackie O Motherfucker (only enough to walk away thinking “noise” is a terrible misnomer), I heard enough to make sense of why Mering’s first solo album as Weyes Blood – 2010’s Outdoor Room – sounds like it comes from a totally different artist than Titanic Rising.

The choices on Outdoor Room become actually puzzling to anyone who started on the wrong end of Weyes Blood’s catalog or the Drugdealer collaborations. Then again, a 2015 interview with Noisey describes what Mering was doing even five years later like so:

“She sings in the traditional folk tones of Karen Carpenter or Joan Baez, but all the echo chambers, magnetic tape reels, and chorus effects obscure the rural nature of her songs into a weird and industrial dystopia.”

If this post just dragged you to Weyes Blood through the same back door I walked through, your reaction to hearing songs like “Candyboy” and “Storms That Breed” could take you to the same place it took me: why is she burying that lush, enveloping alto behind all that clutter? Her comments on transitioning away from the “noise” elements in that Noisey interview come from several places – a little about influences, a little about anxiety about male peers’ responses to “female music" – and, between how attuned and reflective Mering is, it’s no surprse she came up with a way to keep the noise elements, while smoothing them out with folk elements. And, thank god, getting her voice to the front of her sound. Even if I didn’t spend a lot of time on The Innocents (2014) and Front Row Seat to Earth (2016), I still feel comfortable stating that Mering gets better with each album.

That brings the story current and to Titanic Rising. It landed well critically (or at least some familiar sources (NME and Pitchfork) fluffed it on my twitter feed. And it’s a good album – very good, even, and able to grow on the right listened (me) – but it’s also a kind of album. Low tempo, atmospheric, and arranged around long, lithe musical sounds; “Everyday” counts as the album’s only “jaunty” track (it catches you off guard a little; also, that’s a helluva a video/homage to Friday the 13th). Going through the rest of the tracks feels like walking through a succession of quiet, modernist rooms, spaces that give you something to think about it and time to do it. (Even if the apt-in-context “Wild Time” “takes off” a little in its second half). She composes with both analog and digital technology because she likes how they pair, and that passionate enthusiasm makes possible those kinds of effects. (There’s a quick exchange about whether she used a harp in that Noisey interview that’s worth the time.)

Vocals can combine with the music in any number of ways, but within the broad dichotomies of “with” and “against,” Mering’s pitch/tonal qualities might cause her to naturally drift to the former. A 2017 Under the Radar review doesn’t do anyone a disservice by calling her voice “a powerfully expressive instrument,” and she continues to find ways to improve it and allow it to play a bigger role in her songs. I’d also argue that she’s improved at structuring her vocals a little tunefully stickier (“Andromeda” and “Mirror Forever” stood out on that element).

My only regret is that I haven’t yet had time absorb the lyrics, an element that draws praise in every review I’ve read – most often for their power of feeling. The opening lines to “Mirror Forever” are among the few I manage to isolate before going off and wondering among those rooms: the musical sounds – between Mering’s voice and the music - have a nasty power to distract, in the way one lingers on something beautiful and gets lost for a little while.

Anyway, it’s a good album, one that might turn into a great one with enough time. It doesn’t have a ton of uses beyond a listening experience, but it’s a near-perfect fit for that one job. And the album cover is pretty cool. Mering constructed that in a pool and had to manage that photo in three hours before everything puckered. I’m going to close with a quote, and because I really like it:

“You’re not going to feel well in this modern life unless if you take some spiritual steps towards understanding why we’re dystopian, or why we’re ‘sick,’ in a spiritual sense.”