Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising - Full Album Free Download (FLAC)

(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. 

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

"In the face of catastrophe, Natalie Mering always finds serenity. Throughout her fourth record as Weyes Blood, tides are surging, trees are falling, the internet is ruining romance, capitalism is pushing workers to the brink of exhaustion, and reality is breaking her heart. In the wake of all this, Mering continues to search the stars for salvation. Belief—in oneself, in another, in myths—is Titanic Rising’s only request. “I want to make sure everybody feels like they deserve to be alive,” she told Pitchfork. “I hope you could have a smile during the apocalypse.” Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.

Titanic Rising approaches these modern-day problems through a distinctly sentimental lens. Mering has referred to herself as a “nostalgic futurist,” and here she leans into that title by examining the strange ways technology has shaped modern romance through the earnest lyrics and golden, gigantic arrangements of 1970s pop songwriters. But unlike Joni Mitchell or the Carpenters, whose love affairs were clouded by plain old anxiety and desperation, Mering’s love affairs are clouded by algorithms. As she seeks true love on the jaunty “Everyday,” Mering’s desire for companionship bursts forth like a geyser. When she bellows “I need a love every day” over a baroque clavinet, it’s with a herculean determination.

Even at her most optimistic, Mering grounds herself in reality. On the majestic opener “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” Mering yearns to return to the purity of childhood, a time when the world seemed to swell with wonder and possibility. But she cuts her fantasy short and admits that since progress is impossible to escape, why not focus on what matters right now? Later on “Mirror Forever,” she is her most blunt: “No one’s ever gonna give you a trophy/For all the pain and things you’ve been through/No one knows but you.” This advice comes off as almost gravely urgent and upholds Titanic Rising’s acceptance of difficult truths.

Midway through the album, Titanic Rising moves into the murky realm of the subconscious through its instrumental title track, like a sunbeam finding its way to the ocean floor. On the subsequent “Movies,” Mering sounds as if she is singing from the album cover’s sunken bedroom, her voice wobbly and distended. As phosphorescent synthesizers swirl around her, Mering ponders cinema’s emotional shaping of our collective psyche, ultimately finding acceptance in the fantasy. “Movies” might be a melodramatic outlier on the record, but the song exemplifies the way Mering considers the world: as a constant renegotiation of self and place. If the record’s first half was built on swooning dreams, the second half faces the world with a melancholic but hopeful heart.

The truth that lies beneath Titanic Rising is that love blossoms and love wilts. This law of nature is mirrored in the emotional arc introduced by “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” “Everyone’s broken now/And no one knows just how,” she murmurs on the monumental “Wild Time.” The songs are more stoic and elegant even when Mering sings of apocalyptic imagery like a “million people burnin’.”


But Mering’s business is not of misery, but of faith. She suggests dystopian images, but insists that with action, beautiful results are possible. Titanic Rising comes full circle with the instrumental closer “Nearer to Thee,” which borrows the string arrangement from “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” The song’s title alludes to the hymn that the Titanic’s house band supposedly played as the ship sank. Here, as it was then, Weyes Blood can’t help but offer one last breath of hope as she gazes towards an uncertain future." -Pitchfork.com

Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: indie-folk, indie-pop