Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising is a stunning early contender for album of the year
Image: Photo: Kathryn Vetter MillerGraphic: Libby McGuire
Natalie Mering was a gifted child, to say the least. Weathering a life-altering move at age 10 from Santa Monica to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a small town of just over 8,000 residents, she would retreat to her teenage bedroom, adorned with stuffed animals, posters of celebrities, and various sports trophies, a scene that was recreated for the cover of her new record. It was a tough move. “It took my parents almost 13 years to make friends in Pennsylvania. For the first 13 years, our whole family was like, ‘What the fuck is going on? What is this all about?’ We could not wrap our heads around Pennsylvania,” Mering says. And while she individually made some close friends there, she never quite gelled with the personalities around her, always feeling like she was on the periphery, an outcast 3,000 miles from home.
Though she felt the social pressures of the ordinary suburban teenager, what she did in the confines of her room was anything but: She spent her time inventing instruments and recording noise tapes.
“I have this instrument that I built in high school called the harmonics guitar,” Mering, who records under the moniker Weyes Blood, says. “It’s a 6-foot-long stringed instrument with a bridge in the middle, and you play the left side of the bridge so the harmonics are the only things that are picked up by the pickup. It sounds very like a squid in space, alien sounds.”
That instrument and the bizarre soundscapes it was responsible for throughout Mering’s high school recordings are present all across the forthcoming Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood’s fourth release to date and first for heavyweight indie label Sub Pop. The resulting album, a gorgeous collection of ’70s-inspired singer-songwriter rock interspersed with curious synth parts, greatly benefits from the artist’s decision to incorporate her weirder past, looking backwards toward her adolescence in suburban Philadelphia for inspiration as she enters her 30s. By tapping into her more experimental musical upbringing, Mering makes it even tougher to place the record in any sort of genre-specific box, with otherworldly song transitions and an instrumental track that could only be the work of someone who invented the instrument itself.
This newfound experimentation with sampling her teenage music and exploring more ambient sounds was encouraged by producer Jonathan Rado, one half of the duo Foxygen. He’s worked on some of the biggest retro-influenced indie-rock records of the last half decade, including Father John Misty’s God’s Favorite Customer, Whitney’s Light Upon The Lake, and The Lemon Twigs’ Do Hollywood. (“I feel like I’m the lost sister!” Mering exclaims about the brothers comprising The Lemon Twigs, who perform throughout Titanic Rising.) Over time, Rado has given artists progressively more control in the studio, pushing them to play with different recording techniques and use instruments in new ways.
“As much as we were having fun with the songs, we wanted to leave some space for our first love, which was ambient stuff,” Mering explains in a gorgeous hotel room in Williamsburg, gazing out upon the Manhattan skyline. “I haven’t had that kind of feeling in a collaborator in music for a long time. Rado is more about the lack of form. It was fun to deconstruct and get back to the primordial soup of sound-making.”
Rado, who is known for his sometimes unorthodox recording techniques—he once invented a 24-track tape loop that would spin around the studio, and recorded its warbly sound in transit on last year’s Houndmouth album—pushed Mering to look to her instrument-inventing past and try to do it again, even if the resulting sounds didn’t make the final mix.
“I haven’t had that kind of feeling in a collaborator in music for a long time. Rado is more about the lack of form. It was fun to deconstruct and get back to the primordial soup of sound-making.”