A STORM BLOWS through Weyes Blood’s fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. A cold front of disillusionment meets the swirling tones of songwriter Natalie Mering. The effect is gorgeous and staggering.
Sounding both in and out of their time, these songs fuse darkly majestic orchestral arrangements with pop elements such as drum machines, synthesizers, and the occasional guitar. If history took a later start, this could be our classical music. Weyes Blood (pronounced “Wise Blood,” a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s novel set in the “Christ-haunted” South) has said that she craves sanctuary acoustics.
Billowing and hymn-like, “God Turn Me Into a Flower” is the album’s truest prayer. “It’s good to be soft when they push you down,” Mering sings. She sings to stand firm, but never aspires to twist into bramble: “... it’s such a curse to be so hard / You shatter easily and can’t pick up all those shards.”
By suggesting that the softest forces are also the hardiest, Mering embraces “beatitudes thinking.” Introducing his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus illustrates how God’s design, when reclaimed, upends the order of life as we know it. The poor in spirit wear royal robes; mourners know true comfort; the humble reap an endless inheritance.
Through her lyrics, Mering communicates the same wisdom as Matthew 5:5, which reads, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” After listening to “God Turn Me Into a Flower,” a similar blessing rings in my ears: Blessed are the flowers, for they will inhabit, and so inherit, their own patch of earth.
In the beginning of the album, Mering’s alien feelings read as a pandemic response. “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes / We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves,” she croons on opener “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody.” But dive toward the deep with her and discover even more universal wreckage — of damaged, diminishing manhood (“Grapevine”) and shame’s shadow (“Twin Flame”).
In “Children of the Empire,” Mering sings of the shame and lack of tethering love that comes with living inside an empire — presumably the U.S. “So much blood on our hands / King and queen of being lonely / Children of the empire see / That we’re all lost.”
Sonically, the track is bold and resigned. Swelling strings and cool keyboards draw down to sighs before popping with color again. “Children of the Empire” is a generational lament, a longing for the overflow of repentance. Mering is a voice “Trying to break away / From the mess we made / Oh, we don’t have time anymore to be afraid.”
Maybe she knows the secret to strange blessedness. Softness, the desire to commune with the best angels of human nature, frees us from the loneliness of self-preservation. Only while supporting one another can we pull bricks from the empire’s structures. Only with tender hearts can we truly be ourselves — the people our world sorely needs. The answer to empire is never more empire, Mering testifies; isolation goes unsolved behind higher fences; shame yields only to love.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, and columnist for Fathom magazine.
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