Weyes Blood
The Outside Room

I stumbled upon Weyes Blood by chance while listening around, and that chance brought me to the first track of the second album. 'Wait, I might have found something - I tell myself - I'll stop here and listen to the discography with fresh ears. So I start with the first LP The Outside Room: very interesting... after a second and third listen: not interesting, this is the discovery of the year. I finish listening to the other albums and therefore: the first 4 albums (including EPs) are, amid ups and downs, excellent, with The Outside Room and Cardammon Times as peaks, then... it happens that an artist, after some anonymous and unoriginal albums, manages to unleash their true art, and it also happens that, after unleashing their art, they fall into producing trivialities due to a lack of ideas/for selling, and the latter is the case of our dear Natalie Laura Mering.
The work I found most disorienting and original yet at the same time seductive and hypnotic is indeed her first The Outside Room from 2011. A psychedelic folk that manages to combine experimentation and enjoyability very well, a rarity. The "experiments" are not ends in themselves, they are always (or almost) subservient to the "arguments" and are themselves arguments. The perception of compositional freedom, which translates here into ethereal, unconventional, messy, "disordered", spontaneous sounds, amidst simple and immediate melodic lines, makes the listening more satisfying because the artist opens up completely as they are, without restraints, without thinking about anything else but themselves, and you are satisfied because they are sincere with you, you don't have to do anything but abandon yourself to listen.
These hallucinatory journeys (because they are not songs but out-of-body experiences) transport us into a kind of ecstasy, thanks to Mering's voice from other times and the massive use of psychedelia, effects, and reverbs... untouched landscapes will appear that we will not see from the outside, we won't have the analytical eye of an observer, on the contrary, we won't have an eye at all, we will not have, we will be, we ourselves will be those landscapes, we will feel that "indefiniteness" that is felt being something, and these landscapes will not be clear and serene but cold and gloomy. The sweet melodic constructs, where present, contrast with the strong waves of reverbs that permeate and surround them, and it's like identifying with everything present in a bucolic landscape shaken by the fury of the north wind, being every leaf, flower, stone, stream, window left at the mercy of the wind, all under a dilated perception of time that makes the experience "R.E.M." Where "Storms That Breed", "Romneydale", and "Candyboy" represent a continuous tug of war between these two "styles" (melodic and effect/noisy) creating that above-described sensation and allowing a blurry glimpse of a canonical structure, in "Lost In Dreams" and especially in "In the Isle of Agnitio" the gates at the borders of perception swing open and the most radical dreamlike, the most disorienting hallucination takes hold, undefined forms try to emerge from the darkness.

"Storms That Breed" is a waltz shattered by distortions that gradually become more suffocating at the expense of an acidic organ arpeggio and Weyes Blood's sententious and tired voice, as if everything is straining to maintain a background melodic harmony without completely derailing toward concrete noise. "Lost In Dreams" is pure abstraction, the music is indefinite, punctuated by a faint guitar arpeggio and the voice is reduced to formless ethereal choruses. "Candyboy" is an acoustic guitar ballad supported by a rhythm based on noises and shredded by all sorts of distortions, the melodic protagonist is Mering's elegiac and moving singing; it ends with a long organ tail high on acid. "Romneydale" is another dreamlike ballad: the guitar and vocal line proceed drowsily punctuated by chimes, in the ""chorus"" joined by wailing ghosts that follow the chanting voice, which proceeds afflicted in a via crucis of lost souls. "In the Isle of Agnitio" is a journey into the dark and inextricable forest of the subconscious, Mering sheds every folksinger guise and transforms into a mind traveler, pure hermeticism. "His Song" is another hermetic elegy.

The affinity I detected, proportionately speaking, is with Nico; an affinity present in the gothic framework of the songs, in the particular deep vocal timbre, and perhaps more significantly, in the use of reverberated sound effects to recreate that dream/nightmare atmosphere and that cursed aura (especially in "Lost In Dreams" and "In The Isle of Agnitio"), however, here the atmospheres are more rarefied, and the melodies echo more dreamlike-epic and less spectral, harking back to distant times, halfway between medieval Celtic folk ballads and Gregorian chants; everything is immersed in a lysergic potion and made to slow down. If Nico is the priestess of darkness, Mering is more like a mage in the grip of hallucinations caused by sulfurous fumes, she might not be as cool as the former but is still remarkable.
If we want to point out some flaws, the blend between melody and effects seems a bit rough and confusing in some points, execution errors abound, the melodic section is elementary and, linking back to my "almost" mentioned above, in some parts it is quite disconnected both instrumentally and conceptually from the noises; the fact is, however, that these "objective flaws" paradoxically make the work, from my perspective, even more "romantic" and "complete".
What this album has given me, and will especially give to all those slightly cursed souls who love meditative and dreamlike folk-rock, is comparable to the power of much more acclaimed works, which is why I try to acclaim it a bit myself.