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| 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.
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:
