The artist ... accompanies her instrumental idiosyncrasies with strong, luscious melodies and unfussy lyrics.
Like all the best musicians and songwriters before her, she’s plumbed the depths of her imagination and brought forth a masterpiece from the depths.
Titanic Rising ... finds Mering edging her peculiar psych-folk closer than ever to the sound of traditional pop music. For someone with a documented predilection for idiosyncrasy and experimentation, she sounds completely at ease in these new songs, and ready for bigger things ahead.
Rado’s opulent production gives the experience of listening to Titanic Rising—particularly on headphones—the feeling of being enveloped in sound, insulated from the outside world like an astronaut looking down at the earth through layers of atmosphere.
Fantastic songs, meticulously detailed production and a certain, hard to name spark of connection all gel into the near-perfect statement that every part of Mering's strange journey before this led up to.
Despite Mering's sonic flights of fancy, Titanic Rising is a lean, 40-minute recording that carefully considers her performative sentiments with fine craftsmanship. No emotions go astray—every full-hearted melody here stirs a passion in both subject matter and skill.
Weyes Blood comes through with an immaculately produced and performed baroque pop album in Titanic Rising.
Titanic Rising ... is something else; tightly structured, lavishly orchestrated, brilliantly realised.
In committing to the sounds of the past so utterly, she fucks up the linearity and distance of time, proving that feelings of helplessness and heartbreak are as timeless as pop music.
Solo act Weyes Blood brings grandeur to a lonely stage production, ethereal at times while shockingly concrete at others, thanks to its intoxicating blend of cosmology and cinema.
On Weyes Blood's radiant and beautifully anachronistic fourth studio album, Titanic Rising, Natalie Mering achieves a perfectly balanced synthesis between the old and familiar and the new and unexplored.
Natalie Mering’s fourth album is a grand, sentimental ode to living and loving in the shadow of doom. It is her most ambitious and complex work yet.
Mering’s soaring vocals and diaristic lyrics anchor the music in the here-and-now while preserving for itself a timeless quality that makes Titanic Rising one of the best albums of 2019 so far.
Given its extensive breadth of stylistic differentiation and enormous crop of influences, Titanic Rising’s most obvious skill lies in just how easily it all fits together.
She is the spokesperson for generation Y. Which in a way cleverly juxtaposes with her o nostalgic 70’s production style of folk and art rock.
Titanic Rising may draw inspiration from the past, but it's ultimately a clear-eyed look at love, catastrophe and hope that's perfect for the present moment.
‘Titanic Rising’ harnesses convention and refashions it into something singular. At once a document of this “wild time to be alive” and an escape from it, it’s often remarkably good.
‘Titanic Rising’ harnesses convention and refashions it into something singular. At once a document of this “wild time to be alive” and an escape from it, it’s often remarkably good.
It’s a strangely addictive mix, comfort-food nostalgia that telegraphs knowingness without sarcasm, parody or airquotes.
Ultimately, it is Titanic Rising’s fusion of ancient and contemporary, 70s singer-songwriter tropes and electronic burbles, that convinces; the beauty Weyes Blood offers has its eyes wide open.
Much like the power of the big screen, ‘Titanic Rising’ presents an immensely elegant journey to a different place and time; in equal parts beautifully delicate and powerful.
Titanic Rising is a leap forward for the self-described “nostalgic futurist,” yet Mering’s core musical gifts remain intact.
The most powerful tool at Mering's disposal is her voice, a rich, clear bell of a voice that pierces through the album's pianos and lethargic strings.
Titanic Rising is a rewarding listen, and although a few later tracks fade a bit too quickly, the atmosphere and imagery created through the first two-thirds create an album that is definitely worth spending some time with.
Titanic Rising sounds cathartic and triumphant.
On ‘Titanic Rising’, her fourth release under the Weyes Blood moniker, the LA-based musician has drifted further away from the psych-folk and ’70s Laurel Canyon of her early years and towards soft rock.
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