Agnes Obel – Myopia
By George Moraitis
| Label: | Blue Note – 00289 483 7175, Deutsche Grammophon – 00289 483 7175 |
|---|---|
| Format: | Vinyl, LP, Album, 180g, Gatefold |
| Country: | USA & Europe |
| Released: | 21 Feb 2020 |
| Genre: | Pop, Folk, World, & Country |
| Style: | Vocal, Ballad |
This is an album to be ‘experienced’. To listen to it any way other than to make time, turn down the lights, relax and give yourself to the music is doing it an injustice…missing the point of this music. The Danish singer, songwriter, and musician was quoted in an interview “The piano and singing are two equal things to me, maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices. The music is the most obvious means to express what I am, where I am.”
Myopia is her fourth album and was recorded during sleepless late nights in her home studio in Berlin, which is audible in the record’s contemplative, isolated mood. Obel’s voice manages to be thin, translucent, weightless, yet at the same time portray a sense of gravitas like she’s tapping into an ancient wisdom. There is an ethereal melancholy like a sadness of angels. “I wanted to depict that sense of being trapped within a state of mind with very little peripheral vision, where what is left to be seen only gets increasingly intensified,” she said. This intricately crafted album captures that feeling profoundly.
Myopia means ‘nearsightedness’. The album slowly invites you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. Blurred vocals and murky instruments create an ambience, draped in a cloak of macabre misery. Tales of human connection, relationships, spirits, loss, vulnerability….
There are inflections of Grouper, Kate Bush and Tori Amos as this album explores its own magical landscape yet it feels like it is slightly obscured. Myopia, with its atmospheric piano, shadowy vocal effects, and persistent tension, resists clarity. These songs are obscured like frosted glass, meticulously pretty yet unnerving. The entire album inhabits that desolate place of twilight solitude and forces you into introspective mood.
‘Broken Sleep’ has a rhythmic haunting effect, very powerful sense of broken grandeur as her voice dovetails lusciously with pizzicato strings and a piano. Fittingly, this song was used by the Series ‘DARK’.
“Island of Doom” tackles grief as soaring voices wash over muffled piano. Her gliding vocals are pitched high and low so as to melt into the musical minimalism as another instrument. Within these exquisitely produced tracks, which often eschew the typical chord progressions of pop music, Obel also experiments with altering the pitch of violin, cello, felt piano, celesta and mellotron. These two songs prick the hairs on the back of your neck with their unnerving dissections of the fragile human heart and are an emotional highlight of the album.
The exhilarating title track creates an atmosphere of intoxicating dejection with its soaring vocal arcs and silvery string arrangement. Building mournful strings over descending piano chords on “Parliament of Owls”, Obel creates an engrossing instrumental track of melancholic beauty. It’s followed by the equally involving and cinematic “Promise Keeper”, which begins with a gently sung folky melody and the drone of a sustained piano key building tension until the middle of the track releases, powerfully, into cascading vocals. This cohesive mood piece casts a hypnotic spell. The album closes with the ruminative “Won’t You Call Me,” Obel’s voice fluttering over piano rumbles like an apparition floating on the wind.
Myopia is written, arranged, produced, and mixed by Obel, who also handled all vocals, piano, keyboards, synths, beats, and rhythms. It’s both ambitious and self-sufficient. Obel’s experimentation with warping and pitch-shifting vocals, strings, piano, celesta, and a luthéal (an extra-harmonic piano used by Ravel) is unusual and in my opinion, highly successful. The contributions of violinist John Corban and cellists Kristina Koropecki and Charlotte Danhier must also be noted. This is indicative of a new style of ‘chamber music pop’ that is now taking place at Deutsche Grammophon.
Despite the veiled, dark mood, I love this album. I love its beauty, its interlocking poetry and its artistry. There is an unfettered elegance to Obel’s angelic and ornate sound as it mixes bliss with anguish and assimilates traditional music with sombre elements of art-pop and electronica to glittering effect.
Track listing
A1 Camera’s Rolling
A2 Broken Sleep
A3 Island Of Doom
A4 Roscian
A5 Myopia
B1 Drosera
B2 Can’t Be
B3 Parliament Of Owls
B4 Promise Keeper
B5 Won’t You Call Me