Album reviews: Impressive offerings from Weyes Blood and Cork lads God Alone
Weyes Blood has released And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow; while God Alone's EP is ETC.
- Weyes Blood: And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
- ★★★★☆
'Climate-change pop' is becoming its own genre and after the Weather Station’s triumphantly grim Ignorance in 2021, the sense of living through an era of escalating doom is conjured in even more mournful terms by Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering.
And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow isn’t a departure for Mering. Rather it is a restatement of the musical and ecological principles she forth in 2019’s Titanic Rising.
That record featured a mock-up of Mering’s childhood bedroom submerged beneath the waves. And if the sleeve for her fourth album is less moderately haunting — it’s Mering in an old wedding dress, her heart pulsating with an ominous red light — the impact of the music within is just as forceful.
Weyes Blood’s stated purpose with the project is to highlight the clear and present danger of the climate crisis via the medium of stately protest rock. As an emotional sucker punch, it lands its blows: sounding like Karen Carpenter trapped on an ice floe at the end of the world, opener It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody is gorgeously glum.
That same blend of bleak orchestration, Laurel Canyon piano and bright shining melodies illuminates, Children of the Empire (“living in a lost time…so much blood on our hands”).
But if humanity is breaking up with Planet Earth, then Mering has been through more personal heartache too. This is revealed in the crepuscular Grapevine (“if a man can’t see his shadow/ he can block your son all day).
As with Titanic Rising, Hearts Algow is sometimes easier to admire than enjoy. It stays in the same woebegone tempo throughout and Mering’s chocolate box vocals — lush and saturated in flavours — won’t be to all tastes.
But as a concept album about the death of nature it is both stark and lovely — and offers gut-wrenching confirmation of Mering as a rising star of alternative rock.
- God Alone: ETC
- ★★★★☆
“Dance-infused noise rock” is how Cork five-piece God Alone describe themselves, and on their new EP the band kick up a taut and painstakingly-calibrated ruckus. A blitz of pummelling guitars introduces Tinfoil In The Walls — while Kung Fu Treachery flows from avant-garde noodling into dusky slide guitar.
The spirit of early 2000s punk-funk is elsewhere conjured on the title track while closer Peony is in the proud tradition of Leeside post-rock (Boa Morte, Waiting Room). It adds up to a righteous tumult sure to charm anyone who enjoys vim and volume brought together in tooth-rattling harmony.
