Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising

April 5, 2019 - Sub Pop

… the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

– David Foster Wallace

There are parts of Titanic Rising, the fourth studio album by producer-singer-songwriter Weyes Blood aka Natalie Mering, that could have been recorded in the 1970s. Except for the subtle cues of its modernity: the impeccable production quality, the organic approach to the poetry, the fearless compositional structure. She cuts up well-known pop conventions and then pastes them back together however she pleases, resulting in many moments we recognize and relate to. It fools us into a feeling of timelessness, but there is definitely a timeline behind that veil. And it’s all a bit off, like a past-future reality.

The album kicks off with ‘A Lot’s Gonna Change,’ a letter from Mering to her younger self about the angst of existing. It’s matronly like a mother to a daughter, starting with tough love then ending with tenderness: “show me where it hurts.” Because it definitely does hurt. The synths sound like my childhood Casio keyboard, a bit of nostalgia cut in half by the haunting of the perfectly-placed minor chords. With a complete orchestra behind her as she sings, strings swelling in and out of anthemic waves, Mering’s voice is like velvet. She luxuriates in each note, like a classic Disney princess, or Carol King with the self-awareness of David Bowie. 

Speaking of Bowie (because we are here now), the second track ‘Andromeda’ follows with space as a metaphor for isolation. The lyrics are smart and loose, but there is narrative structure. We take a journey from the loop between loneliness and apathy that is broken and blooms to life with love for another someone, or something, perhaps an idea. The use of the slide guitar is a classic move for creating dreamy longing, but it also reads as a modern imprint on this track, a clue that we are in a present of sorts. 

‘Everyday’ continues the theme of longing, as a track about questioning the desperation true love creates. I admire how Mering feels no obligation to the refrains in her music. They are handled casually. She can start a song at one point, move forward down a path and never look back. This is her journey as creator, not ours as listeners. We can spectate and empathize with the beauty, but we must remain out of the way. 

‘Something to Believe’ swells, swells again, swells again, then swells yet again. The words describe how depression warps time around you as you grasp for something to fill the emptiness. Mering is extremely intimate and honest here, like a spoken diary. She ends the song indulgently by repeating the desire over and over again in a hypnotic spiral: “something to believe in.”

At the halfway point of the album, Mering gives us the title track ‘Titanic Rising.’ It’s a short, unassuming instrumental soundscape, but it marks a pivotal moment in the timeline of the album where the mood shifts. We are transformed by muffled and distorted sounds in space to miniature versions of ourselves, and we become aware of our existence in a large body of water. This perspective shift perfectly prepares us for the next track—my favorite. 

‘Movies’ starts with undulating synths that carry our miniature selves downstream and into a dreamscape. Maybe we think we are hallucinating from the lack of oxygen, but the drama of the celestial harmonies and the slow, drawn crooning meet our desire to escape from real life into a different reality. Something simple, like a story that plays out in less than two hours of clock time. The strings hit, the drums crash, then Mering belts out the revelation that she wants to be in the movies instead of the here and now. On the big screen, life makes sense and every moment has meaning. It’s an innocent desire, but one I realize many of us have. We process the world through internal dialogue, as though we are starring in a cinematic version of our own life. It’s protection from the truth that life’s moments can be so mundane and so absolutely meaningless. As humans, we fail to exist without meaning. 

The final four tracks on the album are dripping with tenderness and unmistakably modern. ‘Mirror Forever’ tells the eerie but common tale of a self-destructive romance, a dangerous codependence in identity, over boom-crash drums and an intermittently tender music-box melody. It’s followed by ‘Wild Time,’ which has a sample that sounds like an electronic alarm clock keeping us on edge. Everyone faces a moment of realizing what they are as an individual in the context of human culture at some point in their lives. Since culture is something that can’t be escaped, the realization is only useful as a catalyst for a decision on a coping strategy. And ‘Wild Time’ is a song about that decisive moment. It’s disconcerting, a subject that those of us who haven’t faced it yet are afraid of, and those of us who have are afraid of remembering. As Mering sings, “You did what you had to do.”

‘Picture Me Better’ reads like an interesting internal dialogue, where Mering splits herself up into an abandoned child writing to an estranged parent. The desire for intimacy but lack thereof is tender. Tender is the day. Tender is the night. 

The album’s finale is an instrumental ‘Nearer to Me,’ a full string section of violins and cellos that swell up and down and land on an unresolved chord. It feels unfinished and weighs on us, like we’ve been inside of a psychological thriller and are walking away with the afterimage. 

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

This is water.

– David Foster Wallace ☔