Tangles of Beauty
Jennifer Castle
Angels of Death
Angels of Death, Jennifer Castle’s followup to her Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted Pink City, is a stark contemplation of death as experienced by the living, but it’s also a meditation on writing and legacy. It begins and almost ends with songs referencing highways: on “Tomorrow’s Mourning,” the narrator is driving through wet weather on the expressway, moving and stuck at the same time the way that on “Tonight the Evening,” the narrator is at home with a hand on the radio and a mind to the highway. Country soul torch song “Crying Shame” may be the most universally relatable, straightforwardly structured song Castle has ever written, made more empathetic by gospel backup vocals that seem to help exorcise frustration, pain, heartbreak and loneliness. One of the most rollicking, shimmery songs on Angels of Death is the title track, which borrows the second half of its lyrics from an Al Purdy poem. “Rose Waterfalls” is a lighthearted Great Speckled Bird-style romp that offers the band another opportunity to rip while Castle ruminates on the joys and liabilities of an active imagination. Rose Waterfalls is not her, Castle says, but a character through which to talk about switching back and forth between normal life and writing. (Idée Fixe, ideefixerecords.com) FOLK
What is Angels of Death about?
It was time to talk about what happens with the people that are left and make sense of that. The tangles of beauty and inspiration and how grief is so romantic, you are left with this idea of a person, and you have to rearrange your whole entire heart and world to fit the idea of this person into it. The idea becomes kind of homeless once the body is gone, and we rush to give it a home. Everybody knows, rearranging is messy; before it gets tidy, it’s messy. So it was that kind of scrambly moment where these beautiful things keep occurring even the moment after something very tragic happened.
What’s the role of backup vocals on this album?
Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig ended up more of a chorus position [versus backup vocals]. It kind of gave things a bit of a holy feel and also a real sympathetic feel. Felicity [ Williams] sings on it too. I feel like they sympathize with the narrator, with whatever she is doing. They are just right there, sympathizing. That’s kind of the role of the chorus, I think.