“Drank a lot of coffee today!”, “I love movies!” and “I just lay down and cried!”: just a smattering of the lyrics that you’ll find in this album that I relate to with my body and soul.
Titanic Rising is shaping up to be my album of the year and with good reason. Natalie Mering, the real name of Weyes Blood, delivers some gorgeously melodic vocals that feel like the love child of Karen Carpenter and Father John Misty. With it comes a decadent seventies production and a stunning, stylised album cover. It’s taken myself and my friends by storm and become my most recent record to write to. If that isn’t this sign of a cracking album, I don’t know what is.
Mering’s lyrics are as poetic as they are sardonic and sarcastic at times. They present the Weyes Blood character as a misanthropic wonder, wandering through life and yearning for it to get better. I found tracks like Something to Believe, Andromeda and Movies featured the most considerate, almost lyrical lyrics. Rather than fitting with the main melody, she seems to weave the music around the importance of her words. Of wanting to be treated better in love and knowing there is a better life out there, somewhere.
Throughout the entirety of the album Weyes Blood gives it her all. Her vocals, much like her lyrics, are raw, unfettered and allowed to run rampant in order to build a decadent soundscape that sets her as a cut above the rest this year.
Words by Jack Roberts