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Weyes Blood Titanic Rising Sub Pop

08.04.19

Natalie Mering’s 70s-indebted psych folk project Weyes Blood has increasingly become an outlet for exploring life’s biggest questions: the difficulties of love, finding meaning, the fate of the planet. While her sentiments were often veiled in metaphor, her latest album Titanic Rising soars into certitude.

Titanic Rising sounds cathartic and triumphant. Ethereal strings and slide guitars carry the atmosphere skywards and there’s a sense that Mering has been finding a lot of answers, both personally and artistically, to the questions she’s alluded to in previous work. Still, darker sentiments persist, with lines like “Got a lot of years of bad love to make OK/ It gets me every day/ Then again it might just be me”, from Everyday, making it clear that progress is always ongoing and salvation is never absolute.

Mering’s otherworldly demeanour and rich, assured soprano creates a sense of removal. As a narrator, she seems to float above the unfolding drama without ever falling into self-indulgence. And while critics might label Mering a throwback on account of how heavily she mines 60s and 70s sounds, there’s always just enough of her own contemporary spin to mark her out as a truly unique voice.