Weyes Blood

Weyes Blood
Titanic Rising
Sub Pop Records

Singer and songwriter Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood, is a cosmic explorer who has set her sights on finding enrichment and enlightenment, even when mired in confusion and despair. Once she discovers the treasures she seeks, her goal is to bring them into the light.

The Los Angeles-based musician lays out her quest in vivid, cerebral imagery on her new album, Titanic Rising. Eight years after her self-released debut album, The Outside Room, and three years following her last release, 2016's Front Row Seat to Earth, Mering returns with a fourth album: a search for positivity and love in an environment of darkness and ruin.

Mering enters Titanic Rising's time machine on “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” summoning a symphonic pop setting and singing, “If I could go back to a time before now.” She gazes to the heavens in the celestial “Andromeda,” a song bathed in quivering synthesizers and soaring guitars. The buoyant “Everyday"  bounces along with lush instrumentation (Mering cites classical and Renaissance-era music as a major influence).

“Wild Time” is a grand gem, gliding and soaring effortlessly in the heavens. The brief title track, one of the two instrumentals that appear on Titanic Rising, perfectly captures a sense of being underwater, perhaps plummeting to the depths where the actual Titanic rests. The song's dreamscape ambience provides a respite before the next song, “Movies,” which sums up the cinematic motif that frequently emerges throughout this album.

Mering wrote all of the songs on Titanic Rising and co-produced the album with Foxygen's Jonathan Rado. Among the many contributors are siblings Michael and Brian D’Addario of the Lemon Twigs.

Titanic Rising delivers on many levels. There are layers and layers of lyrical complexity and lush melodicism throughout the album, revealing new nuances with every listen. Like bringing the wreckage of the actual Titanic back into the light, Weyes Blood has crafted an album of discovery, wonder, and imagination. Her mission was to seek. Her goal was to find. The result is a stunningly beautiful album filled with hope and optimism.