Agnes Obel: Citizen Of Glass

AGNES OBEL: CITIZEN OF GLASS (2016)

1) Stretch Your Eyes; 2) Familiar; 3) Red Virgin Soil; 4) It's Happening Again; 5) Stone; 6) Trojan Horses; 7) Citizen Of Glass; 8) Golden Green; 9) Grasshopper; 10) Mary.

At the very least, she deserves some credit here for finally deciding to branch out and diversify the formula. No major changes, that is, but at least this time around, it gets harder to confuse her with the average sentimental piano balladeer — if only because there's less piano around and more strings, as well as more variegated keyboards, a mix of acoustic (vibraphones, etc.) and old-fashioned electric stuff like the Mellotron and even the Trautonium, a real electronic relic hauled straight out of the 1930s. Apparently, this is the first instrument to be heard here, producing the odd siren wail in the intro to ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ and immediately setting an atmosphere of distant alarm — always distant, of course, because the protagonist of all of Obel's songs lives in a perfectly shielded bunker; as long as she confines herself to that place, she's perfectly safe from all the troubles above.

The title of the album apparently translates the German term gläserner bürger, and is used to define a (human) object of mass surveillance, but do not think that the lady goes into politics here, or into morbid ruminations on humanity's dystopian future (unless you really want to interpret a line like "we took a walk to the summit at night, you and I" as a documentary description of an imaginary meeting between Russian and American presidents). It is more of a hint at herself, I believe, and how she's got nothing to hide, a predictably irritating paradox in the light of the fact that she is still hiding everything that is possible to hide, because a straightforward interpretation of any of these songs remains out of the question.

The songs do get more complex in structure, and it gets harder to shoo any of them away as just another melancholic waltz — in fact, I suspect that somebody must have told her to lay off the waltzing, because the time signatures here tend to get less and less trivial; not challenging enough to approach avantgarde levels, but diverse and unpredictable enough to lay off any accusations of laziness. She is clearly interested in exploring the possibilities of classical and «retro-modern» instrumentation in the modern studio, and I respect that. I only wish that the songs had been as memorable as they were on Philharmonics, which is still not the case, alas.

Atmosphere-wise, ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ is clearly an improvement over most of Aventine. The combination of whale-like synthesizer sounds with the quietly, but firmly plucked strings and bowed cellos really gives it a sort of «walking under water» feel, a perfect backdrop for an equally glorious performance... but this is where the song falls short, because other than her usual «frozen lady of the lake» tone, Agnes does not reward the instrumental mix with any outstanding moments of vocal magic; actually, she's no better and no worse than Lana Del Rey now in this department, although I'd still take her instrumental compositions over Lana's in a whiff.

On ʽFamiliarʼ, she makes an awful mistake by having the chorus sung by an uncredited male performer who sounds like Antony Hegarty (oh, sorry, Anohni) with a particularly sore throat, turning the song from something that was distinctly Agnes Obel into something else that is even more distinctly not. I know it's supposed to be a you-and-I duet and all, but in her own singing, even when it is hookless, she manages to avoid theatrical mannerisms and come across as a real human being — so why is she taking a walk to the summit at night with a guy who sounds as if he wouldn't really be interested in girls in the first place? Also, the music here is getting way too dangerously close to New Age values, even for my tastes.

Still, I cannot get truly angry at most of these songs. The title track, for instance, has something Eno-like about it in its soothing piano and vocal harmony ambience. ʽStoneʼ does the same with acoustic guitar (and actually adds a strange vocal hook, which always sounded like "stone canopy, stone canopy" to me until I learned that it was really the artist asking herself whether she can be of stone — do not worry, Frøken Obel, you are of stone, in way... or should that be fiberglass? Citizen Of Fiberglass, yes, that would be a good title).

Anyway, without going into too much detail on the rest of this stuff: she is still getting a good sound of all these instruments, and, technically, she remains an above-average composer, but the new twists and expansions do not change my base impression that she has already made her single most important statement, and that she is going to spend the rest of her life just bathing us in the somewhat shapeless beauty of her impressionistic approach. Which is nice and all, but as long as she is incapable of finding any particularly heart-tugging soundwave configurations, I do not find myself interested in trying to decode her enigmatic messages, or defining the types of persons to whom her sorrowful and subtle music would appeal the most. Perhaps she should try coming out of that bunker? Or at least, exchange it for a less soft-padded one?..

Agnes Obel: Aventine

AGNES OBEL: AVENTINE (2013)

1) Chord Left; 2) Fuel To Fire; 3) Dorian; 4) Aventine; 5) Run Cried The Crawling; 6) Tokka; 7) The Curse; 8) Pass Them By; 9) Words Are Dead; 10) Fivefold; 11) Smoke & Mirrors.

Unfortunately, Obel's second album firmly places her in the never-ending list of artists who may have said everything they had to say with their first shot, and then simply go on to say it again and again and again, for all those who love it when they are being told the same thing over and over as long as the speaker actually opens his/her mouth and produces fresh sound waves, instead of relying on this new-fangled «preserve it for posterity» recording technique. In other words, Aventine follows the same formula as Philharmonics, but with predictably diminished results.

Or, perhaps, not really «predictably»? Perhaps there are problems here that could have been avoided? For me, these problems start with the very first track. On Philharmonics, the brief impressionistic piano piece ʽFalling, Catchingʼ sounded wonderful — a perfectly captured piano tone and an engaging, subtle dynamics as the little piano riff smoothly wound its way upwards. In contrast, the opening piano instrumental on Aventine (ʽChord Leftʼ) seems to make more use of the sustain pedal, is slower, more emphatically sadder, and, on the whole, belongs far more effi­ciently on the soundtrack of some commercial melodrama than on an album vying for «piece of art» status (I wanted to write «high art», but let's keep this populist and democratic).

It is still okay, but it is quite reflective of the overall quality of the album, with generally less memorable and less musically interesting songwriting. Whether or not you loved ʽRiversideʼ, its waltzy structure and folksy vocal melody were at least catchy and well adapted to each other. On Aventine, the first song is ʽFuel To Fireʼ, a pure mood piece set to a two-chord piano riff and not varying at all for five minutes — still retaining the overall tastefulness, but absolutely amorphous as a composition that you'd want to possibly cherish and preserve in your head. And when it is immediately followed by ʽDorianʼ, another five-minute song that is essentially more of the same (gracefully mumbled, hookless singing set to a piano melody that even certain minimalist com­posers would probably have rejected)... you know something's gotta be wrong about that.

And these songs were the singles culled from this album — although the first one was ʽThe Curseʼ, a slightly better waltz piece (for some reason, the waltz tempo always seems to work better for Agnes) played by a bass / cello / piano trio and sung with some haunting vocal modula­tions; with its allegorical lyrics about a pseudo-mythical situation, it is the closest thing to a «chamber epic» on Aventine. Still, as far as songs salvageable for compilations go, I would not dwell too much on ʽThe Curseʼ — rather sticking up for the title track (another waltz, this time harp-based, with a very pretty cello / harp texture) and, perhaps, ʽRun Cried The Crawlingʼ (with a very Andrew Bird-like violin, probably played by Canadian Mika Posen, generally credited for violin on the album). And that's about it — everything else is pleasant at best, mind-numbing and somnambulant at worst.

What is really incredible about this is that the disappointment in no way rubs off on the positive impression I had of Philharmonics — I keep playing bits and snippets of songs from both albums back to back and I can't help but be somewhat bewildered at how her piano melodies that used to incorporate emotionally brilliant flourishes have so seriously melted into flat muzak, and at how her vocals, that used to find such a good balance between husky-dusky and subtle sharp­ness, are now almost always just husky-dusky (with the exception of a few relative highlights). Again, perhaps some people will think that naming your album after one of the seven hills of Rome and dedicating one of the songs to an Oscar Wilde character should suffice to redeem every other sin — I respectfully disagree. I do not give the album a thumbs down, because, all criticism aside, I still like the overall sound of it, which does not bother or offend me one bit; but where Philharmonics was a «subtly active» record, whose emotional charge gradually disclosed itself upon repeated listens, Aventine is a soporifically passive one. Any final recommendations? Well... to quote yet another ambitious singer-songwriter of our times who's had her ups and downs, "You better work bitch!"

Agnes Obel: Philharmonics

AGNES OBEL: PHILHARMONICS (2010)

1) Falling, Catching; 2) Riverside; 3) Brother Sparrow; 4) Just So; 5) Beast; 6) Louretta; 7) Avenue; 8) Philhar­monics; 9) Close Watch; 10) Wallflower; 11) Over The Hill; 12) On Powdered Ground.

Say what you will about the coming of the electronic age, but still, no wonders of electronic program­ming can beat the smooth-but-strong ripple of a real piano, particularly when the player shows both heart and experience. The first track on this album is just a short and humble instru­mental, written (like much of the album) under the huge influence of the old impressionists (par­ticularly Satie), but there is something about the tone, about the sharp staccato playing, about the composition — starting somewhere in the middle of the keyboard and then gradually, gracefully sloping away to the high-pitched right — that has a certain immediate appeal. Piano introductions by themselves are not rare at all, but this is not the kind of generic «ooh, I like piano! Elton's my favorite!» introduction you'd hear on, say, an Alicia Keys record.

Agnes Obel is different — a quiet, enigmatic performer from Denmark (with an excellent com­mand of English, though) who seems to know very well just how far you can push your enigma in order to remain «artsy» without becoming irritatingly cheap. Of course, these days the market is overstocked with Femme Fatales and Mystery Women of all varieties, some of them with a very good idea of which particular brands of Mystery Lipstick and Fatalistic Drapery are better converted into YouTube views and MTV Awards (Lana Del Rey, here's looking at you). Agnes Obel is not entirely free from the «sin» of calculating her own image, either — but her calcula­tions, based on a mix of minimalism, humility, aural and visual nostalgia, and exquisite attention to minor subtle detail, are... well, simply put, these are my kinds of calculation.

She is quiet, moody, melancholic, somewhat (but not painfully) monotonous, and does not awa­ken any hitherto unknown emotions — from Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush to Sinead O'Connor to tons of other female performers I could come up with, we've already felt these emotions. But she has her own style of minimalistic chamber pop, more classically inspired than anybody I know, and at the same time, a good ear for pop hooks: if, upon first listen, none of these songs strike you as catchy, this will probably be due to the barebones arrangements that do not vary too much from song to song. In fact, many customer reviews I've seen for this one essentially treat Phil­harmonics as a pleasant background-listening ambient album — but it's not; each of these songs is a carefully crafted composition in its own right, you just have to warm up to them a bit, like you might have to warm up to Debussy's preludes if your previous ideal of classical solo piano was Chopin's mazurkas.

Perhaps the first single from the album, ʽRiversideʼ, was not fully indicative of the album's charm. It is, after all, a fairly simple folk-waltz, with nothing but a simple piano line and some multi-tracked vocal harmonies to keep you occupied; even so, it still manages to sound nothing like your average indie-folkie-singer-songwriter churning out generic heartbreaker stuff (to be used in the soundtrack to your average indie-director melodramas about uninteresting problems in the lives of everyday boring people). There's melancholy here, but no moping or whining, no self-aggrandizing and no artificial struggle to show you great, great depth — it's very light, simple, tasteful, unassuming, and unavoidably endearing just on the strength of what it is not, rather than of what it is (okay, that probably sounds dumb, but not while the actual song is playing).

But it actually gets better. On ʽBrother Sparrowʼ, we have a piano/guitar duet, with the two in­struments gracefully completing each other, and Obel's vocals mimicking the piano line all the way to a logical and satisfying melodic resolution — there's a sort of frosty-friendly beauty here, as if she were writing the soundtrack to the everyday life of a real flesh-and-blood Cinderella with free access to her late mother's old collection of Satie records. On ʽJust Soʼ, which I can very well imagine as a triumphant power pop anthem (here deconstructed right down to its knickers), there's a piano-and-what-sounds-like-plucked-violin duet instead, with the former gradually drow­ning out the latter.

On ʽBeastʼ, I don't even understand what the instrumentation is — in con­cert, she performs it as a piano/cello duet, but here the first instrument sounds more like a harp, so I guess it's more of a piano/harp duet, with one instrument blending in with the other seamlessly, until the cello comes midway through and cuts right between them; also, I'd never have guessed that a refrain with lines like "let's go tonight, let the beast run a mile" could sound haunting, but here it is delivered so coldly and casually that it is haunting. ʽAvenueʼ, another old-fashioned waltz, has a tinge of the musical box to it, but only a faint one, to better attenuate the sad chord change on the "nothing more you need to know, nothing more you need to show" refrain; then the title track is another waltz, but with an entirely different feel to it — a sad, but not broken-hearted obituary to "the only God of mine" who "died last night in grey stockings, in all might", whoever she is singing about (an old lover or an unrealized ideal).

For an artist who composes most of the material on her/his own, the choice of occasional covers can also be important — Obel chooses ʽClose Watchʼ, a song from John Cale's Music For A New Society, which, amusingly, she actually makes a bit more musically complex than it was in the original version, adding a tighter rhythm, some percussion, vocal overdubs, and echo: the result is tightly controlled chamber-pop perfection, compared to the looser, more rambling per­formance from John — not sure if he'd like this or not, but, anyway, it's telling that of all mem­bers of The Velvet Underground, she prefers Cale and not Lou Reed (and not even Nico, despite being a bit of a frigid Scandinavian goddess herself).

If the album has any sort of internal logic of development, it is best seen on the final track: ʽOn Powdered Groundʼ is just a touch grander and fuller than everything else, with a very distinctive, pleading cello track and a final bequest to all of us — "don't break your back on the track", she keeps repeating, as if she were some deeply caring Mother-of-all wishing us a safe journey through life. Indeed, the whole album gives a somewhat Taoist impression of a recluse in the middle of the forest, struggling to live in peace with the universe despite the universe threatening to shatter that peace if you ever let him. It's a perfect little album for all those who just want to stop for a while, break the vicious circle of eternal karma, lose themselves in an atmosphere of quietude and immanent beauty — okay, so a Brian Eno ambient album may be the best solution here, but if you are really not the meditative type, Philharmonics might do a great job of serving as the next best substitute. Oh, and she's got great taste in clothes, too. Thumbs up.