On the cover of her self-titled debut, Mirel Wagner's face rises out of the gloom, her features emerging from-- or perhaps retreating into-- the pitch background, one eye leveling its gaze at you. It's a haunting image, and one that fits her music perfectly. The Ethiopian-Finnish singer-songwriter plays stark doom-folk in permanent flux between light and dark, life and death, and concerns of the soul and desires of the flesh.
All we hear is a dexterous, spectral guitar and Wagner's haunted vocals, so intimate they could be your inner monologue. Exhibiting a firm grasp of American folk traditions, she understands not only their oldness and weirdness, but also how they hint at worlds that never existed except as fantastical alternatives for the real one. She manages to find common ground between Dock Boggs and Townes Van Zandt, between Geeshie Wiley and Robert Johnson, between Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Wisconsin Death Trip. As Wagner understands it, folk needs no revival: These referents still exert a primal power no matter how old they are.
There she is at the crossroad, finding erotic possibility as she makes a deal with the devil. "Red" describes a lover with red eyes and possibly cloven feet. "Let the devil take me," Wagner's narrator submits. "He'll eat your flesh and spit out the seeds," she is warned. Such an act may be even tantalizing for the seduced woman. The supernatural elements work because they engage folk music's long history of addressing sin and temptation. They work because Wagner sings them in a small but unwavering voice: Facing eternal damnation, she sounds utterly and unshakably certain of her lust for Old Scratch.
Death looms over this debut, making Wagner's quiet songs sound much louder. "No Death" not-so-subtly rewrites the old Appalachian dirge "O Death" with an old EC Comics storyline. A man refuses to believe his lover is dead. Necrophilia ensues. The visceral imagery can be disarming: "Her hair is long, still smells like mud," she sings. "She answered to my kiss with a rotten tongue." Wagner flirts with goth hyperbole, yet her commitment to the idea lends it the emotional heft of confessional songwriting.
Following "No Death", "No Hands" isn't what you might expect. Rather than chronicling amputation, it turns out to be a nostalgic ode to childhood-- to days spent riding her bicycle under the watchful eye of her mother. "Look mother, no hands." The song is neither bitter nor sweet, but a curious memory considered in the fewest words possible. Likewise on "The Well"-- another tune that invokes an unspeaking mother, this one long since gone-- Wagner conveys a powerful sense of wonder at the world, investing even the smallest details with stark significance.
Wagner uses her acoustic guitar the way hypnotists use crystals and pendulums. The repetition of short themes, which all sound like they still have attic dust on them, lull you gently and escort you into her dark world, which is both larger and more unusual than its sketched quality might suggest. She lays down a truncated blues riff on "Dream", a bed of nails for her spoken-word delivery. On "The Well", her acoustic filigrees sound like sunlight on water. Mirel Wagner possesses a curious physicality both in her lyrical conjurings and in the confident agility of her guitar playing, which together sound distinctive, specific, and personal even when considered against the decades of acoustic folk music that has come before.
