***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | November 2022***
Weyes Blood
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Sub Pop
Buy via Official Store | Listen Below
On “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” the opener to Weyes Blood’s new album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, the sound is so uncannily ’70s folk-pop in the vein of Karen Carpenter (or even Anne Murray) that it seems almost impossible that the song is a recreation of an era-specific aesthetic rather than an actual artifact. Even more curious, the video features Weyes Blood (real name Natalie Mering) in an old-timey cabaret setting, dancing with a cartoon smart phone that feasts on bloody corpses strewn across the stage and the audience. The two—young woman and cartoon—dance together as the camera pans back and forth between the choreographed routine and the lifeless bodies on the floor, and we get a distinct sense of just how alone this woman is, certainly in this theater—but possibly in the whole world.
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is the second part of a trilogy that began with Mering’s 2019 breakout Titanic Rising. That album was an “observation of doom to come,” sounding the alarm on climate change, the drying up of natural resources, and the fracturing of genuine human connection—an apocalyptic state of the world. This album, as chapter two, was written during the pandemic and examines that human fracturing even more deeply. “I was trying to process this idea of irrevocable change, and what that does to personal relationships, the damage it can do to people, because it’s so isolating,” Mering told The Guardian. At the same time, however, And In The Darkness is also “a romance novel—there’s a lot of love songs.”
Although the rest of And In The Darkness doesn’t recreate the crystalline, soaring Karen Carpenter sound as perfectly and spookily as its opening song, the entire album does harken back to a ’70s aesthetic throughout. A lot of people hear Joni Mitchell in Weyes Blood, but at least on And In The Darkness, hers is a sound that also represents a pop era of almost defiant, willful innocence sandwiched between the tumult of hippie protest music and the screaming, bloody birth of punk rock. Jan and Marcia Brady music. Ranch homes in suburbia, in addition to Laurel Canyon. It’s also incredibly beautiful. “That I ended up making beautiful, feminine music is a surprise,” says the 34-year-old Mering, who was once in noise bands called Jackie-O Motherfucker and Satanized. In fact, if you listen to Mering’s four solo albums prior to In The Darkness, it’s easy to hear the pretty ’70s aesthetic emerge slowly and then flower (her first album still features a ton of noise and industrial elements, while the others before Titanic lean more towards modern folk).
By creating an odd discrepancy between the sounds of one bygone era and the immediate problems of this one, Mering carves out a wide space for contemplation. An uncanny valley that allows the listener to meditate on the strangeness, and the impracticality, of how we’re living right now. That’s her winning formula, and it’s why Titanic Rising and now And In The Darkness resonate far beyond simple sonic beauty. And it’s not just political—Mering’s music is deeply personal in its radical views of fractured connection, and its aching desire for community and true intimacy. The album’s cover image, with Mering as an angelic figure with a flaming saint-like heart, is meant to represent a glow stick: “You crack it and it glows,” she explains. “It’s about the power of having your heart so broken that it would emanate a light.”
On the aforementioned slow, waltzing Carpenters-esque ballad “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” Mering confesses in the album’s opening lines to a deep, searing loneliness: “Sitting at this party / Wondering if anyone knows me / Really sees who I am / Oh, it’s been so long since I felt really known.” She then suddenly understands that, instead of being alone in her feelings of isolation, her isolation is actually a point of commonality. “Oh, it’s not just me, it’s not just me / It’s everybody,” she sings knowingly, and with that repetitive chorus the song becomes almost hymn-like—something easy to sing along to that taps into a truth bigger than ourselves. Mering switches to the universal “we” frequently throughout the album— “We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves” is the shift on this particular song—and it serves to further create the sense that the aim of And In The Darkness is to actually foster finding our way back to one another, not just to document the need.
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On the piano-driven “Children of the Empire,” we get a Carole King-tinged confession of “livin’ in a lost time” and, though the overall message is somewhat vague, Mering seems to address her Millennial and Gen Z contemporaries: “Oh, we don’t have time anymore to be afraid.” The next song, “Grapevine” is a folky, melancholy lament, with subtle brass and strings, for a lost lover—an “emotional cowboy, you stayed up all night trying to beat up the moon.” Her voice is warm and enveloping here, stunning in its ability to reflect the nuances of sadness and awe at once.
“God Turn Me Into A Flower” deviates from the overarching ‘70s theme, and we get spare synth paired with vocals reminiscent of Sinead O’Connor, accompanied by the sound of birds chirping. It’s church-y and angelic, bringing to mind that glowing-heart cover photo, as well as Mering’s devout (yet abandoned) Pentecostal Christian upbringing. The song carries a turn-the-other-cheek ethos, among pulsating sounds of transcendence: “It’s good to be soft when they push you down / Oh, God, turn me into a flower.” Softness here is a strength, while brittleness causes one to shatter.
“Hearts Aglow” brings us back to a ’70s pop sound (that Carpenters aesthetic) complete with finger snaps, orchestral swells, sun-streaming harmonies, and a mellow electric-guitar solo. Though it’s about a relationship that blossoms for the narrator after years of a life devoid of friends or fun, the song is universalized in the opening stanza—“Oh, hearts aglow / We don’t know where we’re going / Looking for love in all the wrong places / We don’t know where our love has gone.” And yet Mering contemplates her conflicting desires to connect and protect her heart in a deeply personal way that anyone who’s prone to caution might easily understand— “Might be the moon or the cotton candy / Or it might be a man / Who actually understands me.”
“Twin Flame” is another glowing, pulsing track with syncopated beats and church-like swells, a sonic fraternal twin to “God Turn Me Into A Flower.” It examines both a specific romantic relationship that’s collapsing inward due to unchecked ego, and the state of universal love among human beings—“’Cause we are more than our disguises / We are more than just the pain / And I’m standing here laughing at my shame.”
The jangly, rhythmic “The Worst Is Done,” is reassuring in the fact that, no, you’re not imagining it—we’ve been through a lot. “It’s been a long, strange year / Everyone’s sad they lost what they thought they had / We lost our voices / Can’t keep with all the changes.” It mourns the loss of who we were before, while embracing who we are now—with hesitance. (“It’s time to find out what we’ve all become.”) There are, of course, regrets. The narrator laments, among gorgeous harmonizing, not having stayed with her family, laments having stayed in her own little place “in the world’s loneliest city.” In fact, she marvels at how easily and seamlessly we leaned into hyper-isolation. “I hear it from everyone / We’re all so cracked after that.”
The album ends on another Carole King-reminiscent piano ballad, “A Given Thing,” about waxing and waning love. “Sometimes, our love is enrapturing / And other times, it’s just unraveling in front of me.” Paradoxically, because it’s a personal love song, it concludes the greater narrative on a note that’s significantly lighter than the preceding deep meditations on the state of our lonely, disconnected, cracked world that we get on the rest of And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow.
The microcosm and macrocosm of personal relationships juxtaposed with the world at large was a dynamic Mering purposely cultivated on And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Therefore, ending on a deep dive into the individual human heart, or the individual relationship, is truly the album’s perfect ending. “A lot of the way that people feel within relationships is impacted by what’s happening societally,” she observes. “The social fabric is disintegrating, and relationships are becoming more complex in terms of taking two completely individualistic people and trying to combine lives, or trying to be a couple in a world where there’s not a lot of community.”
Notable Tracks: “God Turn Me Into A Flower” | “Grapevine” | “Hearts Aglow” | “It’s Not Me, It’s Everybody”
BUYAnd In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow via Weyes Blood’s Official Store
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