Angels of Death explores gospel and country
As its title might suggest, the spectre of mortality haunts the songs on “Angels of Death,” the Polaris Prize-nominated third album from Canadian musician and songwriter Jennifer Castle.
Produced by Castle and Jeff McMurrich (U.S. Girls, Basia Bulat, Alvvays) and released earlier this year, “Angels of Death” was partly recorded in a 19th-century church near Lake Erie, a location that Castle said helped contribute to the mood of the album.
“I always like to play to the sound of the room I’m in and collaborate with my surroundings as much as I can, so I think that it played a part,” she said in a phone interview this week. “I was also dealing with certain subject matters that kind of felt borderline spiritual, so I think it was pretty cool to be in an old church that was no longer being used for what it was built (for).”
The album’s quiet gospel-soul and ethereal country also serves as a fitting backdrop for Castle’s ruminations on the creative muse. The lyrical contrast between the light of artistic creation and the darkness of death is something Castle said she explored more fully on this album than on her previous records.
“I think that they’ve kind of popped up in a lot of my other work, I definitely visit those themes on a regular basis,” she said. “They tend to pop up more as passing fragments or asides or directional points in music, but I don’t fully rest on those issues. So with this record, it piqued my interest to just rest with the issues a bit and give them the time to flesh them out.”
Backed by a band that included Paul Mortimer on lead guitar, David Clarke on acoustic guitar, Jonathan Adjemian on organ/ piano, Mike Smith on bass, and Robbie Gordon on drums, Castle recorded much of the album over a single weekend (the rest was recorded at Sonology studio in Toronto), and said the recording process was unlike any she had attempted previously.
“That weekend that we recorded the bulk of the songs and also the more central thematic songs, it was a whirlwind of a weekend,” she said. “We set up and played live off the floor as a band, which I’d never done before, and (there was) more attention to performance than perfection. And just a lot of the design challenges that
we were met with as soon as we faced the reality of trying to record in a big church, with absolute sonic bleeding and zero separation — we wrangled those issues and kind of just let it rip.”
Castle’s previous album, 2014’s “Pink City,” was also nominated for the Polaris Prize, and Castle recently collaborated with fellow Polaris nominee, friend, and tour mate, The Weather Station (a.k.a. singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman) to record the recentlyreleased single, “Midas Touch,” for the Polaris Collaboration Sessions series. Castle also recently released “Live at Massey Hall,” a video that captures her performance there while touring for “Pink City.” She said the experience of playing the famous venue did not disappoint.
“Massey Hall was just so refreshing, because I was so excited to play it and from the second we got there for the day, it ended up just feeling really special throughout the whole time. I kept telling myself to make sure I opened my eyes while I was on the stage and really take it in, because I can tend to introvert a little bit and just go inside if I’m nervous. Or if it seems like a really big show, sometimes I just close my eyes, but for Massey Hall I just really wanted to be present. It was such an amazing experience, it really is sonically special,” she said.
Castle will be bringing a sevenpiece band to Starlight on Dec. 13 as she nears the end of a tour that’s taken her across North America and Europe over the last two months. Though she’s happy playing shows with a full band, Castle said she’s ready to return to the solitude of writing once the tour ends.
“I am really looking forward to these full band shows, because it’s nice to have the communal experience of playing music after doing a huge chunk of the tour solo, but it’ll be nice to reset a little bit and quieten down. I also feel like there’s writing I want to get to, so it kind of needs to just quieten down a bit before I can get to that,” she said. “I’m certainly having fun playing, it’s just it’ll always be nice to get back to more writing work.”