Many people will recognise the feeling of gobsmacked powerlessness so often engendered by current affairs. Not for nothing was “permacrisis” declared the word of the year for 2022. US artist Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood, pronounced as Flannery O’Connor would say it, eyes up environmental collapse, the sinister march of tech into human relationships and the lack of love seemingly endemic among humans and responds by throwing all the beauty she can muster back at them.
It is a great deal of loveliness. Her voice is one for the ages, a real-deal instrument that taps into classic American timbres: Karen Carpenter or the folk sirens of the 60s-70s cusp. Mering’s vocal default mode is limpid grace, tilting at old timey mellifluousness. She definitely doesn’t want to be inhaling all the dry ice that has been pumped on stage at the start of her set. “No more fog!” she instructs. “It’s apocalyptic enough as it is.”
But when Mering very occasionally lets rip – as on the great key changes during God, Turn Me Into a Flower – the hairs stand up on your arms and whoops fill the air. While she spends most of this gig soft-lit by gentle ochre shades, this organ-drenched hymn finds her singing in darkness. Surrounded by little electric candelabras, her disembodied voice is all the more sonorous. Video plays out on the screen: a collage of people going about their business, both sinister-normal and downright disturbing, by famed documentary polemicist Adam Curtis.
Then there’s Weyes Blood’s music itself, a body pillow of sumptuousness that, although it’s coming out of regulation speakers towards the front of the room, somehow contrives to feel like surround sound. For this tour – dubbed In Holy Flux after a track on her latest album, 2022’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow – Mering is travelling with a conventional band, having left the album’s harpist, string section and wind instruments behind.
Earlier Weyes Blood records were folkier, noisier propositions. But the last two – And in the Darkness and its immediate predecessor, Titanic Rising (2019) – have found the singer-songwriter embracing 1970s soft rock, the immersive potential of analogue synths and the great American songbook. Both string and vocal arrangements on her records tend towards the swooning and cinematic – nodding to the vintage films Mering used to watch as a child, when her media diet was policed by Pentecostal parents.
Key, too, is the quality of her writing, which takes in the vicissitudes of love but also looks askance at what has become of the American dream – and its dreamers – from a very contemporary perspective. Here, Weyes Blood recalls Joni Mitchell, an instantly recognisable chronicler of her times.
If the current vogue is for nostalgia, Weyes Blood fits right in, with music that draws audibly from a time when the US still seemed like a superpower and white westerners often went on their merry way, unburdened by things such as pandemics. But running against that cosy grain is the knowledge, embedded in almost every Weyes Blood song, that everything is fast becoming harder: finding love, holding on to certainties, contemplating the future.
One of Mering’s loveliest songs tonight, A Lot’s Gonna Change, harks back to this kind prelapsarian consciousness, a childhood of constancy and safety. But “a lot’s gonna change in your lifetime”, she warns herself. That song was released in 2019. “This ended up being a lot truer than I ever could have imagined,” she tells the audience wryly.
The Worst Is Done, from And in the Darkness, marks the end of the pandemic with a sigh of relief, but notes that “the worst is yet to come”. Even as the surface of Weyes Blood’s chamber-folk-pop can appear smooth, elements of undoing are contained within. The keyboards on Children of the Empire sound like a sour fairground calliope. Everyday ends on a skronk of keyboards and noise, a vestigial holdover from Weyes Blood’s much more experimental past.
Having been a child in LA, circling back in adulthood, Mering has a respect for showbiz tropes – and for displaying her awareness of them, à la Father John Misty. A few songs in, she declares she’s giving us “a tight five minutes of banter to make the sad songs less heavy”. She dances around, using her billowing white Grecian gown as a prop, twirling her microphone. Dryly, she discusses her disbelief in astrology (“I’m a Gemini, but I self-identify as a Scorpio”) as a way of leading into a song called Something to Believe.
But it’s the sincerity and the all-enveloping quality of Mering’s art that resonates most loudly. Built on keyboard oscillations and her stern, velvety tones, Movies probably remains Weyes Blood’s knockout blow; a song about cinema – and screens more widely – that sees her dress used as a backdrop for projections of water, reflecting the drowned-world theme of its parent album.
Embedded in Mering’s dress is a secret chest section that lights up red towards the end of the set: that’ll be her “heart aglow”. Her plea throughout these magnificently sad songs is for people to urgently witness the humanity of others, to behave as though we were all wearing our glowing hearts outside our bodies. Equally, it looks like there’s a big infrared target on her chest.
