Weyes Blood
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Weyes Blood Turns Doom Into A Dazzling Account Of Apocalypse On And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow
“Livin’ in a lost time,” groans Natalie Mering on Children of the Empire, the second song on And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. From the jump, the singer behind Weyes Blood addresses the strange and catastrophic context that surrounds her fifth album. Weyes Blood’s last album, and the first in a trilogy, Titanic Rising, forecast of doom and devastation. The album’s grand orchestral compositions outlined the scope and size of the danger that Mering predicted. Of course, a global pandemic wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
Rather appropriately, its sequel, which Mering has described as a response to apocalypse, draws upon feelings of hopelessness and claustrophobia which have circled since 2020. There is no explicit mention of COVID, however. The threat in And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is even more omnipresent, and Mering’s descriptions of it are more aloof. Across 10 scrupulously constructed songs, Mering’s spirit cracks, she loses contact with loved ones and is even pushed to unabashedly reassesses what it means to be human in the present.
“I’ve been without friends, oh I’ve just been working/For years and I stopped having fun,” she sings with agony on Hearts Aglow, a sign of her struggle to assimilate to life in the modern era. The dire future Mering started sculpting on her last album is fully realised here. An uneasy tension flows through every facet of the album. On It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody, it’s embodied through a string of self-doubt (“We’ve all become strangers/Even to ourselves”), and on The Worst Is Done, Mering is racked with fear of isolation. “No one coming by to see if you’re alive,” she sings, laying bare her most crippling thoughts. Mering captures tragedy with so much detail, chances are you’ll notice similarities to your own dilemmas in her diaristic writing.
While this is all weighty stuff, Mering’s delicate, wispy voice prevents the content of the album from ever becoming overwrought. On Children of the Empire, her stainless voice soars above the marching synth melody allowing each layer space to breathe. And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is an immersive listen that benefits from not having an archetypal focal point at all times. Mering intelligently plays into this on It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody. During the song’s final third, speech is replaced by a sweeping cacophonous section of string instruments. Mering adjusts by overlapping wordless melodies with a paradisiacal-sounding harp. In the hands of a far less engaging vocalist, the interplay may come across as chintzy.
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow hits all the right notes, just in some of the wrong places. Although the two instrumental interludes, And in the Darkness and In Holy Flux, add to the sinister atmosphere, they’re positioned too closely together to fulfill their purpose. With only Twin Flame, the most upbeat song here, separating them, they interrupt the album instead of guiding it. God Turn Me Into A Flower is another moment that fractures the album’s momentum. It drags somewhat across its six-and-a-half-minute runtime, revealing its true beauty only at the halfway point when Mering is accompanied by birdsong.
Elsewhere, the long-winded format works in Mering’s favour. The songs of And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow build in a linear fashion, growing more mystifying as they reach their climax. Grapevine, for example, is held together only by a galloping guitar motif until its final minute, where a cacophonic, kaleidoscopic synth medley unfolds. Mering herself handled the album’s production alongside Johnathon Rado and Rodaidh McDonald. She draws upon her varied portfolio (she released a dark ambient album under the banner Weyes Bluhd in 2007) to ensure that the album is stylistically malleable and never once predictable. It is both a joy and shock to hear her tinkering with such grimy, guttural tones on In Holy Flux.
The album’s biggest surprise, however, is that there is a happy ending. Sort of. “And I can’t tell where you end/Oh, and where I begin/Oh, it’s a given thing/Love everlasting,” are Mering’s final words on And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. In this situation, love, albeit a complicated one, is what distracts her from the world caving in on itself. In an album all about trying to find some light in the dark, it’s a gratifying final moment that is immensely effective both as a conclusion for And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, and a segue into the final act of Mering’s stellar series.