Weyes Blood, Roundhouse review — Laurel Canyon lives on in mellow, subversive songs

The singer-songwriter scene that emerged in bohemian California in the 1970s has become an object of fascination and idealisation half a century later. Former hippy enclaves such as Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles are treated as dreamy utopias where the grooves are forever easy and the melodies always sweet. The cult of the Canyon has its pantheon of gods, such as Joni Mitchell and Harry Nilsson, and its high priests, such as Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty. It invokes the fantasy of an analogue paradise amid the marketised hustle of the modern digitised world.

Weyes Blood is among the best of the Canyonite revivalists. Real name Natalie Mering, she is an LA-based singer-songwriter whose latest album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow was among last year’s most acclaimed records. She opened her London show with its first track, “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”.

The music, played by a four-strong band, had a warm thrum, rising and falling with the measured rhythm of a mellow day. Mering sang in a resonant alto voice that seemed to hold something in reserve, a nicely enigmatic register. Holding a microphone and wearing a chic white caped dress and matching 1960s boots, she resembled an angelic singer-songwriter materialising amid the heat and marijuana haze of a vanished Californian idyll.

For the purposes of her gig, this imaginary haze was elucidated by a busily puffing smoke machine. Too busy for Mering’s liking, it turned out. “No more fog,” she appealed after the second song in her set, the richly burnished soft-rocker “Children of the Empire”. The supposed excess of dry ice became a running gag in her patter, which lent it the feel of a stage routine. But it also illustrated the difficulty of turning her impeccably stylised recordings into live performance.

Like its similarly acclaimed predecessor, 2019’s Titanic Rising, Mering’s new album delights in old-fashioned studio sophistication. Each sound is carefully shaped, from the rich cadence of a piano chord to the sense of the close-miked vocalist’s proximity as she sings. It creates the illusion of intimacy, an analogue-era remedy for the themes of digital alienation in her songs. The yearned-for utopia embedded in her music is the product of recording artifice.

At the Roundhouse, Mering was alive to the challenge of transposing her work into a concert setting. She spoke drolly between songs, a more impish presence than her records allow space for her to be. Her playfulness was also expressed by kitschy stage moves, such as exaggerated prom-queen twirls and jolly Busby Berkeley kicks. For the big climax to “Hearts Aglow”, she flung herself to her knees, arm outstretched with full rock-star dramatics.

The subversive elements in her music, its political edge, were highlighted. Specially composed visuals by the polemical filmmaker Adam Curtis were shown during “God Turn Me into a Flower”, a rapid montage of film clips showing a crazed world of greed, pleasure, violence and resistance. Meanwhile, Mering sang in a powerfully hymnal way about reflections and truth, with no trace of irony in her voice. The finale, “A Given Thing”, was an entrancing piano ballad about love and the cosmos, an easily mocked Laurel Canyon vision of how life should be refashioned for present times.

★★★★☆

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