The Singles Jukebox

Josh Winters recommends some mythological floral folk…

[Video]
[6.14]

Josh Winters: I never thought that, in my lifetime, I would experience the threat of war looming above my homeland or the menace of institutional collapse in our society, and I have been fortunate to live this long without those external fears running through my veins. Then again, as lucid as ever, my conscience tells me that I may not have been grounded in the parts of recent history that have led to the great unknown we find ourselves in now. It’s not that I ignored or denied the many tragedies occurring in our world; it’s that my preoccupation with reaching the sublime took hold as a baby adult spreading their wings and trying to make some dreams happen. In the past two years, I’ve experienced the slow death of those dreams, which has been the same as the death of a sense of self that was going to save me from all my suffering. New life and new goals have emerged out of that period, but ever since my visceral sense of mortality hit me the moment I turned 28, there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not thinking about death, with the hope that I (and we) will be able to live long enough to experience a whole, rich life on this earth. It’s not sincerity that’s scary to me; it’s the possibility that we may withhold our sincerity from the ones we love before it’s too late. I had to learn the hard way, but I’m grateful to understand and embrace that life is about other people: our friends and loved ones, at the very least. I hope I’ll become full enough to give myself away generously in the way that art, music, and nature have given an immeasurable amount to me.
[10]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This left me completely cold until I walked through Oakland at dusk on a warm winter’s day, ensorceled by the wonder of the world around me. Then I got it. Still not quite as good as “Movies”, though.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is a gorgeous album, and “God Turn Me Into a Flower” has many beautiful passages that recall the things about that record I found so appealing. But it’s a little too languid and formless, and the gentleness of the composition feels at odds with the intensity of some of the lyrics, particularly the second verse. For 15 or 30 seconds at a time, I can be swept away by the beauty in the song, but when I step back and consider it as a whole, its shortcomings are harder to ignore.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: Weyes Blood’s voice is mesmerizing as ever: in the lineage of Karen Carpenter and Vashti Bunyan, but definitely post-Polachek in its slight auto-yodel. I love how she merges with the horns right at the end of the track, aware her voice is as mellifluous as a reverberating ambient pad. As for everything else, I have to quote a certain critic on some other ’70s songwriters: “Melodic.”
[5]

Brad Shoup: A true but thuddingly banal sentiment–a Serenity Prayer for anyone who’s legitimately asked themselves “am I too online?”–presented with the solemnity of a folk hymn, and garlanded with nature sounds like a new-age album c. 1992.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Steadfast until it’s not, “God Turn Me Into a Flower” wants both the dignity of a hymn and the chintzy splendor of a new age retread. The existence of a new Virginia Astley album clarified for me that this shouldn’t split the difference between the ceremonious and gaudy; both moods only come together here to make the conceptual more needlessly literal. Most painful is the Leaving Records-informed ambiance. If Weyes Blood is the flower, her light source is a, sigh, New Blue Sun.
[5]

Michael Hong: I like the parts where this gets ugly. “You shatter easily,” she sings, stretching her voice into as harsh of a wail as the song will allow. It otherwise feels like just heart aglow, rather than heart set aflame.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A gorgeous phototropism hymn, all the more so for its languid runtime. Flowers don’t turn into themselves quickly, either.
[9]

Micha Cavaseno: The crescendo on this sounds like that one TikTok cover of the “Girl It’s You” song. Somehow that song has far less instrumentation in its arrangement, though it was presumably just remade by someone in their bedroom, and conveys a lot more emotion than Natalie Mering’s pulling off here. So many musicians were asked to make this song feel like it was anything of note, but ultimately I can only think about how nothing this vocal performance is. It’s like if you asked Lana del Rey to become far more anodyne, but half as competent.
[2]

Kat Stevens: I waited and waited for the big belting “…cos I am your LAYYYYDAYYYYY, and you are my MA-A-AN” but it never arrived :(
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The organ played by Weyes takes up a massive amount of space in the mix, even beginning to fade the lyrics above it. The echoing vocals from Ben Babbitt atop it can’t even squeak in, and the shrieks of Daniel Lopatin’s synths just bubble up and disappear. Cornella Babbitt’s cello and Charlie Bisharat’s electric violin also billow below but can’t seem to squeeze past. I mean, it’s great, it sounds amazing, I just want to know what happened.
[10]

Ian Mathers: “God Turn Me Into a Flower” works so much better for me when I watch the video instead of just listening to the song. There’s something about the contrast of the beautiful, opaque music and the more overtly intense images (and how their subject matter and sources vary so widely, and yet still work) that gives the track an oomph I don’t get from it when I try and listen to it on its own. I wind up drifting without the images to focus me, especially during that gorgeous long fade at the end.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I admire her concentration and purity of tone, neither of which she loses here. But she puts both in the service of a drone requiring more spit and fire.
[4]

Tara Hillegeist: It’s tempting to hear such an attempt at the kind of sincerity that deserves the adjective “aching” and sneer away from it: to make a scaffold of the reflex that pulls me, flinching, away from the melodrama of it all. There’s none of the corpse-rot that makes Mitski’s similar songs feel wise enough to excuse its simplicity, only an endlessly swelling moan that dissolves into birdsong, a gesture so cloying it prompts the question of how naive Weyes Blood actually expect me to be about all this. But when I was a child, the first girl I ever loved told me there were trolls living between the trees, and if I chased her deep enough into the woods, she’d show me how to see the hidden places where they slept, too. I figured she was lying, even then — even so, I still reckoned it was worth the risk of falling for it anyway, if I was worth the risk, to her, of believing I was worth trying to convince. It’s been a long time since I lived anywhere near a forest, but I still look out over the dark stiff rows of trees from the windows of passing trains sometimes, and I wonder if someday I might see a troll, looking back. Is that such a selfish dream to have, do you think?
[8]