(2019) Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising [FLAC,Tracks]

(2019) Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising





Review:

The road that songwriter Natalie Mering and her shapeshifting project Weyes Blood walked was a long and twisting route, leading from weird experimental early days to the high definition grandeur of fourth album Titanic Rising. Every step of the journey brought Mering’s gifts for songcraft into sharper focus, with 2014’s achingly beautiful The Innocents losing some of its hush with the soft rock lushness of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth. That 70’s FM radio spirit continues on Titanic Rising, but is expanded with more daring songwriting, larger than life arrangements and the crystallization of Mering’s distinctive take on songcraft. Mering has always been geared towards the big-picture creation of albums more than just writing stand alone tunes. Even her earliest work had a sense of purposeful architecture to the way it flowed between folky dirges and sheets of noise. Here she underscores enormously orchestrated pop songs with eerie experimental ambience, imagining a dreamworld where Joni Mitchell’s late 70’s output was produced by Brian Eno. Mitchell’s introspective searching is a key reference point for many of these songs, with Maring’s self-harmonizing and bounding melodic approach recalling Mitchell on many tracks here. Once album opener “Lot’s Gonna Change” moves from a warped few seconds of synthesizer to its understate piano figure, it embodies the vulnerabilty and struggle found in so much of the Laurel Canyon songwriting set of the 70’s. Co-production from Foxygen member Jonathan Rado might explain the brightly blooming chamber pop arrangements, merging Maring’s soaring vocals with orchestral strings and drum fills borrowed directly from the Beatles. This optimistic throwback arrangement is in full force on the infectiously bubbly “Everyday”, with lyrics inspecting relationship confusion over a track as bouncy as a rubber ball. Mering effortlessly switches gears throughout the album, slipping between the synthy melodrama of “Movies” and the cold coffee blues piano ballad “Something To Believe” as well as making space for acoustic folk numbers, ambient interludes and chamber pop diversions. Easily her most clear-headed set of songs to date, there’s a directness here that sometimes got lost in the layers of earlier albums. She sounds driven and confident, asserting an intense control of the emotional flow of her songs without ever rushing things or letting some of the anxiety she sings about seep into the feel of the album. While all of Weyes Blood’s albums leading up to Titanic Rising were good, even great, there’s something that sets this one apart. Fantastic songs, meticulously detailed production and a certain, hard to name spark of connection all gel into the near-perfect statement that every part of Mering’s strange journey before this led up to.











Tracklist:

01 - A Lot's Gonna Change

02 - Andromeda

03 - Everyday

04 - Something to Believe

05 - Titanic Rising

06 - Movies

07 - Mirror Forever

08 - Wild Time

09 - Picture Me Better

10 - Nearer to Thee





Summary:

Country: USA

Genre: indie-folk, indie-pop





Media Report:

Source                           : CD

Format                           : FLAC

Format/Info                      : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM

Bit rate mode                    : Variable

Bit rate                         : ~ 676-836 Kbps

Channel(s)                       : 2 channels

Sampling rate                    : 44.1 KHz

Bit depth                        : 16 bits