“And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,”The fifth album by Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) announces that there is a reckoning. Throughout 2019’s searing folk-pop triumph “Titanic Rising,”She implied that future turmoil was possible. “A lot’s gonna change in your lifetime,”She sings in the first few minutes of that record. Although her tone was strangely optimistic, the underlying implications were not rosy and suggested unrest. “Hearts Aglow”There is no such luxury as distance. The challenges are all around. “Titanic Rising”The past and the future have come together. “Trying to break away from the mess we made,”She sings on “Hearts Aglow”’s “Children of the Empire”, “Oh, we don’t have time anymore to be afraid.”We are witnessing the turmoil Mering warned us about.
You might find the idea of songs infused with the echoes and effects of the pandemic draining. Mering is an artist that is as direct and emotional as any other. Her writing cuts right to the heart of the topics she is exploring. A lesser artist might find it exhausting and cheap, but Mering finds it often cathartic. It is an exorcism that is both honest about the central challenges and hopeful about our ability overcome them.
This is the pinnacle of hope. “Hearts Aglow”The glistening center that defines love as an unexpected lifeboat in times of paralyzing uncertainty. On the surface it may sound like a shallow thesis, but Mering’s earnestness is striking amid the surrounding tumult: “I’ve been without friends…I stopped having fun, oh, but baby you’re the only one who would drive me down to the pier, take me up on that Ferris wheel.” “Grapevine”The album’s simmering highlight is “Refracting the Incandescent Love of”, which reflects the incandescent love of “Hearts Aglow”Through a sad lens, we highlight a relationship that continues to be strong long after it has ended. “You know I would go back to the camp with the kerosene lamps in the woods,”She sings. “When you were mine, and I was yours for a time.”
These songs, however different, convey a sense of peace and calm that acts as a stabilizing factor throughout. “Hearts Aglow”; the album’s disposition is equally suited to accommodate its bleakest moments as well as its most serene. This is partly due to the album’s supreme patience, confidence, and these songs are allowed to luxuriate, stretching their toes beyond the five- to six-minute mark. “God Turn Me into a Flower” reframes the myth of Narcissus, first in the form of a spare vocal showcase, an exercise in stillness only pierced by Mering’s voice, then later as a rippling sea of synthesizers courtesy of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin.
It’s all anchored by a sense of melancholy that echoes Mering’s past work but is particularly pronounced now that she is rooting it in the grimmest stretches of the pandemic. “It’s been a long, strange year…I should’ve stayed with my family; I shouldn’t have stayed in my little place in the world’s loneliest city,”She says: “The Worst Is Done”; on the opener “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”: “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes we’ve all become strangers, even to ourselves.”These sentiments may sound familiar, but Mering is a gifted songwriter. Her soaring vocals, Laurel Canyon-indebted, chamber pop and widescreen grandiosity give her material a broadscreen grandeur that transcends other pandemic-centric albums. Mering has said that she sees. “Hearts Aglow”This is the second album in a trio that started with “Titanic Rising.” “Hearts Aglow,”It is often difficult to believe, but it is possible to hold on to hope, even when the situation seems grim. Whether that optimism will pan out is an open question, but in the moment it serves as a comfort, and maybe that’s all we need for right now.