Recording: Weyes Blood

Artist: Weyes Blood

Song: Ashes

Recorded at Smiling Buddha, January 19, 2015.

Weyes Blood - Ashes

I was drawn to this show on the basis of the stellar contingent of local support acts, so I was surprised to find a packed house on a Monday night. Evidently NYC's Natalie Mering, who has just released her second album as Weyes Blood, has some buzz. I'd heard that she had a rep as a bracingly-spare, dark-edged folk minstrel, but here she led a backing trio that put her tunes in a bit more of a poppy light — mid-70's folk-rock AM gold, to be precise. Or, perhaps, in more current terms, something like Cate le Bon with the weirdness filtered out. Mering had the pipes (and the tunes) to pull it off without sounding merely pleasantly generic, and I was especially taken by this one, which flipped the dial over to the FM and let the groove take over a bit more.