Woman in white
Ethereal Danish singer walks into a cowboy bar… Chris Nelson tells the story.
Agnes Obel, the airy-voiced Dane whose songs feel hand-delivered direct from the Romantic period, is getting earthy. It’s early in her set and she’s extolling the virtues of the local farmers’ market. It’s not the only incongruity on stage. Her three-piece band, clad in billowy white blouses, like Obel, appear as if they might have been lowered from the clouds above. But these otherworldly musicians stand in front of a massive steer skull. Stage left a tractor tyre hangs on the wall. Stage right, cowboy boots dangle from a rafter. Surprisingly, it all coheres. Songs of dreams and despair, love and loss, are as well placed in a cabin as in a castle. Obel introduces It’s Happening Again, from last year’s Citizen Of Glass, as a song “about my messed up mind”. As she sings that the past isn’t dead, “it’s alive, it is happening in the back of my mind,” Charlotte Danhier creates an aural unease on the mellotron. But there’s nothing synthetic about the madness, in part because Kristina Koropecki’s cello and Isolde Lasoen’s flugelhorn make the delusions feel so frighteningly organic. Throughout the show, all three maintain intense focus, as if glancing at one another might shatter the songs. A band that variously features two cellos, a flugelhorn and an autoharp may seem esoteric, but Obel’s work is approachable from myriad angles. Obel tells the sold-out crowd that Trojan Horses is about paranoia. If love and death are obvious folk themes, paranoia is right out of the metal canon. (You just know that Obel is ripe for a “featuring…” credit on an upcoming Kanye record.) Across the 18-song set, Obel and her bandmates employ a raft of looping and effects, and yet their precision overwhelms any feelings of trickery. They create a massive sound on Red Virgin Soil, as if live-scoring a film about the last uncharted forest on earth. Watching them, it seems totally natural that these four women alone could produce a sound as big as the sky. During Familiar, Obel turns to an effects mike to drop her voice an octave or more for the chorus. “Our love is a ghost that the others can’t see,” she sings. The message of her work is clear: things are not always as they appear, and Obel is comfortable with that, as character and creator. “It can be very good to tell your secrets sometimes,” Obel says affably before Mary. During the song, she and Koropecki briefly fall out of sync and noticeably catch each other’s eye. And it’s perfect. Rather than hiding this minor mistake, they acknowledge it. Secrets have power as long as they stay secret. Once they’re out, the power’s lost. Lost, that is, until Agnes Obel turns it into a haunting piece of art.
“THE FOUR WOMEN PRODUCE A SOUND AS BIG AS THE SKY.”