Misty Mountain - Sophia Yau-Weeks (Album Review)
In a pocket universe of dreamy indie rock, Yau-Weeks makes the past feel like the present, and untangles the last few difficult years personally -- and, by extension, her generation.
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Editor's Note: Sophia and I have been in community with one another for a while, since her time in London. I am not entirely impartial in the writing of this review.
I think it's going to be very hard to make art about what we've all just collectively experienced. We barely have the language for it, and trying to capture the isolation – the free-falling nature of a globalised world post-lockdown – feels gargantuan, narratively. I imagine this is how many artists felt about the World Wars. There's too much to explain.
Sophia Yau-Weeks, humbly, submits her attempt. And, humbly, I believe this is the closest anyone has gotten to explaining what we've been through.
Misty Mountain is an incredibly harmonically dense album that wears it elegantly — tape provides a fuzzy warmth without sacrificing clarity, and Sophia’s voice absolutely soars above it all. The title track is as wonderfully lethargic as it is mournful, and this energy carries, flies, and ducks through this entire body of work.
What strikes me in Yau-Weeks is how strong and unafraid she is in her vulnerability – putting voice to feelings some, or even most of us, don't even dare to articulate, for fear of having to confront them. For those artists who are brave enough to chart this path, I stand in awe.
The first single, Nobody's Laughing, is painfully and unashamedly earnest, in only the way good irony can be, and in the way our generation continues to speak. Lone Wolf borrows that same language, and this energy cascades through The Rain and Love is a Garden, getting progressively more and more honest and earnest until there is no irony left – Spellbound and Fly Away touching on the inescapable beauty of this rock we live on, and the ways we're all connected.
There are heavier moments – a trigger warning for mentions of CSA in Sylvia's House, lyrically unflinching; and the album closer, a celebration of Kristine, Sophia's Grandmother, who passed away - “grief is a gift, takes someone special to be missed like this.”
It will surprise no one that one of my favorites on the album is kind of about "COVID Consciousness" - Monster invites yet more frank introspection, “I could be that monster too", "we’re all intertwined, you and me.” Folk Indie might be the best sonic language for a song like this to speak through – it carries the air of a parable, or a warning, with real strength.
Yau-Weeks is one of those generational talents – a songwriter not concerned with the surface, but with what can be excavated underneath, and speaks it plainly. It takes a special kind of strength, and I feel grateful to know her work, and to know her.
