Music: Weyes Blood, Melancholy in blood

With “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow”, her new album, the American singer gives a continuation to the sumptuous orchestral pop of “Titanic Rising”, which had marked the year 2019.

by Bruno Lesprit

The Parisian meeting with Natalie Merling was fixed on rue de la loyalty, at the Grand Amour Hotel. Like the one we have experienced – like many others, student or bearded and nostalgic quadras – in 2019 for Titanic Rising. Or the fourth album of the American singer known under the alias of Weyes Blood, which offered an ideal and almost premonitory soundtrack during the confinements. She did not fail to note the curious patterns of the carpet – pink pink phallus – leading to her room. “Yes, the place is a bit olé olé,” she said laughing. A term that does not really correspond to the image it returns.

It is another human organ that is addressed and in the darkness, Hearts Aglow, following Titanic Rising, in what is now announced as a trilogy. Hearts in darkness? The Conradian formula, with deliciously obsolete poetry, was born from a “dynamic collage”, by associating two titles of the ten songs proposed: “The word” darkness “had to appear to go with the darkness of time and swing with Identifying, even if it does a little novel with rose water. “

On the carefully kitsch cover, Weyes Blood poses in romantic heroine. Satinated white dress and bare shoulders, long, unented brown hair drawing a perspective that follows a lost look in its dreams, the heart touched by a halo of extraterrestrial light. But from what planet and from what century comes this thirties refugee in a spatiotemporal fault?

Love and loneliness, distress and elevation. His songs summon universal and timeless themes, but with a current concern: the destruction of sentimental relationships by technology and social networks. “Romanticism has been damaged by science and capitalism, it turns into each of us, but the time pushes us to be more and more cynical, observes Weyes Blood. Why are we spiritually ill while material goods have never been so accessible? “

a” dystopian world “

For Titanic Rising, Iceberg’s revenge – threatened today by the melting of ice – was a metaphor for the punishment promised by climate change. The liner sank, it sang with sweetness and the dignity of the transatlantic orchestra in the sinking. The album closed by a brief instrumental played by a string quartet, Nearer to Thee. “Closer to you”, but without the address to God.

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/Media reports cited above.