Weyes Blood is the project of multi-instrument folk musician Natalie Mering. She recorded the four-song Cardamom Times EP on a reel-to-reel deck in her Rockaway, N.Y., home studio; it sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. The playing is patient and assured, and you can't say enough about her voice, a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition. She has the kind of voice that’s both distinctive and familiar, and it fits perfect with her style: the arrangements are at once classic, sneakily innovative, and entirely her own.
Cardamon Times follows Mering's second album, 2014's The Innocents. It's more pure, and the overall sound is less composed. Instead of a complex studio creation, it comes off like an overheard monologue in the woods. The rural, solitary video for the stunning five-and-a-half-minute closer "In the Beginning", which was shot on Super 8 film in Northern Canada and finds Mering wandering the countryside by herself, captures this feel.
Cardamom sounds a bit like an archival folk collection but it's filled with suprising details. The lengthy "Take You There" opens with a minute of melancholic organ drone; for the rest of the track, she sings over the fluctuating keys without any percussion. Opener "Maybe Love" has pretty, Sundays-like guitar strums and eventually, at songs's end, noise is layered beneath ghostly multi-tracked voices. On "Cardamom", her voice is almost distorted beside crystal clear guitar picking and a piping flute. As you listen more closely, subtle touches distance Mering's music from the purely nostalgic.
Her lyrics feel personal. Cardamom Times mostly focuses on love, lost and found and lost again. "Maybe Love" includes the touching, realistic detail: "I like seeing you notice me/ When I’m feeling better about/ You and me." The old-timey sounding "Cardamom" snaps into the present when she sings: "I like your band, can I hold your hand this time?/ Do you find what I do kind of cool?/ Would we last a minute or two?" Nothing seems permanent here, even when the music is timeless.
"In the Beginning", her best song to date, features a melancholic but catchy melody and an arrangement of guitars and organs and her voice. She sings about a field of stars. She sings about suffering and changing, of bittersweet meetings that happen at the wrong time. She asks "Have you ever walked in on a Queen before?" She admits she's not trying to relate at the moment. And she just keeps going, and it's astonishing. Her music seems so simple at first, but it keeps deepening.
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