Agnes Obel and the Capturing of a Feeling

Agnes Obel is about to release her third album, Citizen of Glass, and I had to write something about it.

Let me begin with this: I absolutely adore Agnes Obel's music. It does something very unique and something which I very rarely encounter. To preface further discussion, I will say, it doesn't matter what she says, so much as how she says it.

Obel uses two things, as far as I can tell, to supreme effect in her music. The first is expectation, and the second is tone.

Let's tackle the first. Obel uses expectation and repetition to influence the way the listener accepts her music. A perfect example of this is found in her song "Riverside", appearing on her album, Philharmonics, the name which is playfully apt. Philharmonic, as most people understand, is usually used in regards to a particular musical group, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic. So, despite the fact that Philharmonic literally means: "Devoted to music", Obel, with the inclusion of "s" at the end of the title, is already playing with your expectations. What do you expect when you hear the word "philharmonics"? Probably, at least in my case, an orchestral arrangement. However, in this song, the preeminent of the album, there is only the piano and Obel's voice, both of which are layered in the structure of the song. Which is, honestly, rather short of the expectations set by the word "philharmonics".

I feel as though Riverside is best described as a fable - but as a paradoxical fable, devoid of a moral, and left to the interpretation of the listener. The term "river" is used in both an attractive way, as if saying "come and see", but also in a wary, nearly tribalistic and mythical sense, like it's almost saying: "beware". Listen to the song below:

As you can see, the fabelic (it's a word I just made up, but you get it) feeling the song conveys is contrasted with your expectation of a clear meaning expressed a story told in the form of a fable. The idea of the "river" ebbs and flows through the song, taking on several meanings depending on the state of the song's narrator. In the beginning, the river is described playfully, taking on that sort of mythical and magical quality a child's imagination can imbue on anything. She says: "down to the river we will run", "when by the water we drink to the dregs", and "swim with the current and float away / down by the river everyday". This is then contrasted with the lyrics of the chorus, being: "Oh my God I see how everything is torn in the river deep / And I don't know why I go the way / Down by the riverside". By beginning the chorus with "oh my God", Obel establishes the idea presented in the chorus as being surprising or revelatory, as if she is revisiting a place she loved in youth but now sees in a different light, a role a river perfectly suits for it's ability to give life and to be quite destructive.

So that covers the lyrics. But Obel plays with the genre of the song even more deeply through the structure of the instrumentation. The song begins with a simple melody played on the piano that will carry through the song and also be echoed in Obel's vocals, almost like an overture to a story. She then moves into the verse/chorus structure, and shifts from a right-hand melody over left-hand chord harmony to a rhythmically repetitive chord progression which, if expressed like a rhyme scheme, would be: "aa, bb, cc, dd", all delivered exactly on the beat. Obel's voice then echoes the melody presented in the intro of the song. The only time she breaks from this rhythmic pattern is in the measure between verses, when she hits a note on the "and" of 3, creating an uptick in the beat and drawing the listeners attention. If we are scientifically dissecting music, which I am, I would say that this note on the and of 3 is an extremely deliberate and important one. The song is not interesting because of its melodic variation, which would be more like reading a novel. No, this song is literally a fable expressed musically. The inclusion of that note just before the verse breaks up the monotony and redraws the listener to engage them in the coming verse. In the second half of each verse, Obel includes a few notes on the treble end which serve to highlight her vocal melody, but other than that, it's the exact same as the first. It sounds like it would be boring but... it isn't. It's a beautiful song.

This is because of the listener's expectations. The song meanders and dances around the overall point but expresses it in a genre in which you expect the point to be clear. This gets you thinking about what it's purpose is, and opens the song up to the audience so that they can connect more deeply to the music. But she's accomplished not only through the lyrics but through the structure and form itself. But it's subtle. It's not a reinvention of form but a using it's limitations to influence the meaning of the song. Comparing this to literature, a great example of the opposite of what I'm talking about would be the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I fucking hate that book because I consider it to be basically novelized arrogance. The book has pages of footnotes and chapters on literally irrelevant details, as well as occasionally having certain words highlighted in particular colors and pages where all the text is presented in various shapes, etc. I am sure that Danielewski would say he's playing with form, but it's so obvious that it doesn't subvert my expectations, it just disappoints me and makes me annoyed with the novel. He's not playing with form in that book, he's just abandoning it. There's a difference between utilizing the expectations and limitations offered by generic form and making something so unconventional that it is frustrating. It's like if instead of getting newspapers tossed on your front yard, the paperboy painted the stories on your house. The best artists, in any form, do not shit on form, but include it in their construction of the piece.

So that's part 1 of Obel's music.

Part 2 is tone.

By tone, I don't mean timbre, as in the tonal quality of the instruments and vocals. I mean tone as in the musical environment the song creates. For this, I'll be analyzing the first single from Obel's new album, entitled "Familiar".

This song seems to be a departure from much of Obel's prior work, but in a good way, like the reach of her music has been extended to the next logical step. Just on this first song, Obel uses two things she hasn't used before, as near as I can tell. The first is what I assume is a synthesizer, characterized by electronic sounding, identical "snare" tones, and the second is electronically altered vocals. I'll get to how she utilizes those on this new song in a minute, but first I want to talk about the tone of her music at large.

Obel's vocals have changed somewhat from album to album, and while I've only heard the first few songs to be released from Citizen of Glass, I feel she has diverged once more from her preceding album, Aventine. This album differed significantly from her previous, and first album, Philharmonics, in that it seemed to be pursuing a very different feeling. Philharmonics was polished, highly structured, focused, fabelic, and intent - almost as if each song were a story rather than just a song. Aventine seems to be it's direct opposite, almost a reaction to it's predecessor. Where Philharmonics was grounded, traditional, tight, and familiar, Aventine was ethereal, loose, wandering, and imaginative. It was not as worried about definitive song structure as it was about capturing raw emotion - and it accomplished this to great effect. Obel whispers, sighs, croons and exhales through her words. Whereas in Philharmonics, the lyrics were delivered flat (while still sung beautifully), because the focus was on the lyrics themselves, Aventine was less about what was being said than about how it was said. In my opinion, all great art is undefined, so as to better allow the audience or viewer to find something within that relates to them. When someone says that a painting or a movie or a song is about one specific subject, I feel that this cheapens it, in a way. Suddenly that work is not personal, but sterile, objectified, soulless. It might as well be a textbook. You can find this openness in any form. Agnes Obel accomplishes it in music, as Stacy Kranitz accomplishes it in photography and as Antonín Hudeček, a Czech artist, accomplishes it in his paintings. The works of each of these artists seems to arise naturally from nothing, capturing some essential, undefinable human essence. This creates a feeling of flexibility or ethereality in the work which makes it more relatable to the viewer.

Psyché, by Antonín Hudeček

---

The instrumentation on Aventine further develops this ethereal tone, this rawness. Obel eschews some of the repetition from Philharmonics in favor of longer melodies and lingering, drawn out, skeletal chords. She also utilizes string instruments, such as the violin and cello, more prominently on this album, which further serves to open up the music and make it more loose and flexible. Interestingly, her first album is listed on iTunes under "Alternative", while Aventine is listed as "Singer/Songwriter". This perfectly shows my point, how the music on her second album is so much harder to define, and yet stronger for it. Aventine sounds kind of like what I think the soundtrack of a dream sounds like. Recognizable but distorted. I can't really tell you any of the lyrics without looking it up, but I can tell you what the album is about. What it's about to me, at least. And for me, it's about solitude. It's about seeing someone that was once known to you as close as anyone could be, and knowing they've drifted away from you. It's about that feeling when you know everything's changed and the floor has fallen out from under you. And it's about how all of that is somehow ok, like those events are part of the natural order of the world. It's an album about being heartbroken and sitting at home alone watching a fire with a glass of wine and knowing that everything is going to be alright in the end.

From what I've heard from Citizen of Glass, Obel seems to be once again using some new techniques and instruments to differentiate the album. For example, on the first song, "Stretch Your Eyes", the song begins with a few dragging notes on presumably a violin, then drops into a percussion pattern, followed with Agnes singing. The song then builds to have a staccato melody on the piano, and reincorporates the cello and violin. However, the melody and rhythm are traded off at several points between the piano and strings, which is a technique I don't recall her using on Aventine. Perhaps Obel added strings to completed compositions to add depth on the previous album, and became more comfortable writing with them as a result and included those instruments in the writing process from the beginning on Citizen of Glass.

Then, on "Familiar", Obel seems to return to her ahem, familiar territory, with the piano and her vocals in the foreground. The strings once again appear less to hold the melody than to add to a tonal environment. However, the chorus on "Familiar" is drastically different from anything I've heard from Obel. Her voice is electronically shifted down a few octaves, and layered over each other, while the strings build tension and then release it, to devastating effect. I can't say why but the result is astounding and unique and very emotional. Then, the song ends with 4 notes repeated in succession, the only use of her old technique of repetition that I have thus far heard on the album. It seems to speak of some finality to the song, more so than if it ended on a single note.

The last song released in advance of the album is the stunning "Golden Green". The use of piano in this song is extremely restrained. The song is comprised of a syncopated 3/3 pattern of what sounds like bells. I'm sure it's a keyboard effect, but it's very unique and catches your attention immediately as being quite a departure for her musical style. The chorus also has an uplifting progression, which is also a bit different for her as her music tends to be very melancholic. If I could describe it, the song has a feeling akin to curious discovery. It's very compelling.

In the end, I'm very excited for this album. From what's been released thus far, it appears to be very diverse in its composition, and quite a departure from her previous entries. While still holding on to something familiar.