The Answer Is In The Beat

Weyes Blood: The Innocents LP (Mexican Summer, 2014)

October 24, 2014 at 9:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Weyes Blood’s 2011 album on Not Not Fun, The Outside Room, was a fantastic experimental psych-folk album that I discovered 2 years after the fact (after I saw her live at SXSW) and was blown away by. This is the follow-up on a bigger label (the same one that fellow NNF alumni Peaking Lights graduated to), and it’s much brighter, clearer, and more expansive in sound. Her vibrato-laced voice sounds fantastic, and the arrangements are complex and accomplished, with bright chiming acoustic guitars and vintage synths. The tape-drift opening to 6-minute highlight “Some Winters” nods to her lo-fi tape-scene past, but it flows into some truly beautiful vocals and cascading pianos. A few other songs such as “Summer” have simpler arrangements which showcase her voice more, but the beginning of “Requiem For Forgiveness” covers her voice in eerie, Goblin-like vocoders, before stripping away the instruments and leaving her multi-tracked vocals coo “I forgive you” by the song’s end. Seasons play heavily into the album, not just with the two consecutive seasonally-titled songs near the beginning of the album, but in “February Skies”, where she sings “first day of spring, winter must bring”. “Montrose” is a drifting ambient instrumental with some film dialogue at the end, and then the album ends with another strummy, layered-vocal ballad, “Bound To Earth”. Definitely recommended for all fans of ethereal psych-folk/dream-pop artists such as Vashti Bunyan, Grouper, White Poppy, Marissa Nadler, etc.