“You can’t breathe the dirt, even if you wanna,” Mirel Wagner sings on “The Dirt”, off her second full-length and Sub Pop debut. It’s an odd, almost nonsensical line, at least until she expounds on the idea grimly: “But you’ll be in the dirt…You'll be the dirt.” Wagner doesn’t write songs; instead, she constructs memento mori. Death creeps through this album just as it crept through her 2012 self-titled debut, too matter-of-fact to be sinister but too inescapable to be exactly comforting. Mirel Wagner was a fine introduction to an artist whose lyrics were lushly gothic and whose music sounded like it was fading either into or out of pitch silence. She sang in a whisper somewhere between intimate and conspiratorial, and punctuated her lyrics with spectral acoustic strums and plucks. The mid-fi production lent that album the air of a recently unearthed artifact not yet studied or understood.
For When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day, Wagner sequestered herself in a remote cabin on the Hailuoto peninsula in northern Finland, where she spent time penning these tunes. Afterwards, she booked time at an actual studio with an actual producer—namely, Sasu Ripatti under his Vladislav Delay alias, better known for dance music than for folk. He treats the acoustic elements in similar fashion, isolating each syllable, plunk, and strum as a distinct element. Wagner’s songs remain skeletal—still just bone and flaking flesh—but the sound is more polished, crisper and starker and at times even slick. A few other instruments wander into the arrangements, including an understated electric guitar on “The Dirt”. A bowed cello lurks behind trees on “Ellipsis”, appearing again with an eerie piano to stalk closer “Goodnight”. These instruments (courtesy of Craig Armstrong) are never quite intrusive; they’re more like decorative baubles, neither distracting nor especially necessary.
One consequence of the sharper sound on Cellar is a new brightness in Wagner’s voice, which projects more expressive texture on these songs. She no longer sounds like the scout just returned to report on the afterlife. When she sings in the voice of an abandoned baby on “Oak Tree”, her tone is perhaps too practiced for such a bleak predicament. On the other hand, the disparity between Wagner’s subject matter and her delivery often proves rewarding, deepening a mood and complicating an idea. Opener “1 2 3 4” pairs a jumprope countoff with grisly imagery, rhyming “four” with “What’s underneath the floor?” She seems to savor not just the offputting rot of a line like “big fat belly birthing out flies”, but the syllables themselves: those perverse b’s, that deafening long i sound at the end. Best may be the halting class dissection “In My Father’s House”, on which she describes the hierarchies of servants and answers herself with a knowing hum. It’s perhaps the one song here that completely rethinks her approach, that assembles the musical elements in a new way, and it casts a strong spell. Spoiler alert: Everybody—the maids, chefs, butlers, masters, and children—dies in the end, and so do you.
