Everything appeared to be coming together for Angelo De Augustine with the release of Toil and Trouble in 2023. It followed his full-length collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, to whose Asthmatic Kitty label he was signed, strengthening his position as the chamber-folk auteur’s heir apparent. But behind the scenes, De Augustine was falling apart.
As he recently revealed to The Guardian, he had collapsed at his home in Los Angeles halfway through recording the album, on Halloween 2021. Days of medical testing produced no diagnosis, but the sense that his body was failing persisted. He pushed himself to finish because he was sure he was going to die.
If Toil was a secret dispatch from the edge of oblivion, Angel in Plainclothes, De Augustine’s new album, is openly about finding his way back—renegotiating how to live, sing, and play guitar while managing symptoms with causes he doesn’t fully understand. He suspects chronic stress is at the core. Being in the water helps, which explains the swimming-pool scene in the moody making-of film, tellingly titled “Can I Come Back to Earth?”
He must have felt so far away from the young artist known for whimsically recording on reel-to-reel tape in an empty bathtub (for the resonance). But he’s also a consummate professional whose music sculpts in emotion more than it directly reveals, so little on the placid surface of Toil or Angel betrays the underlying turmoil. Instead, the effect is contextual: An otherworldly fragility that once seemed mannered now seems moving and hard-earned.
It helps that De Augustine—a gifted singer and songwriter from the start—is sharpening his identity beyond Suf’s understudy or Nick Drake’s spiritual grandson. Yes, he can sound like a falsetto harmony that Stevens might track over his chest voice, the lower realm that De Augustine, always elevated, seldom visits. But there seems to be no part of singing he can’t handle in a richly colored whisper, and this committed airiness sets him off from his mentor. He’s just as much like Elliott Smith, or Justin Vernon pre-cyborg ascension.
And yes, he does wash early Anglo-American folk music with chilly art gallery air-conditioning until it turns brittle and bone-white, then sets to with exotic lacquers and a tiny brush, covering the artifact with artifice. But Stevens is a miniaturist, whereas De Augustine is a purer minimalist, especially on the numinously spare Angels. The songs give the intriguing impression of having been fully arranged, then severely pared away, leaving behind starkly outlined space. It’s a somnolent register from which the music seems to keep waking up.
Opener “Empty Shell” is a scrambling waltz on the leaning deck of a sinking ship, as the first of Oliver Hill’s fine string arrangements spumes over it unpredictably. The standout “Pet Cemetery” has a balmy, earthy groove warming its eerie arctic rainforest vibe, a fluttering cloud of bell-like tones concocted with obscure zithers and idiophones. (It also features backing vocals from De Augustine’s mother, Wendy Fraser, who dueted with Patrick Swayze on “She’s Like the Wind.”) And “Spirit of the Unknown” highlights the sheer uncanniness of De Augustine’s voice, the aching melody punctuated with sounds you’d expect to come from bowed glass.
“The Cure,” which draws parallels between chronic illness and the cycles of addiction, interrupts verses that trip along like Donovan with a bloomy dream-pop chorus. It’s part of a mid-album climax, along with the melting country-soul facets of “Mirror Mirror,” where the album almost threatens to rock. But it retreats back to elegant curlicues with “Cosmic Ride” and the painfully gorgeous “The Universe Was Our Mother,” a piano ballad pricked with Leng Bian’s harp.
Perhaps what sounds like careful taking apart is really evidence of how carefully the album had to be eased together. In light of his ordeal, De Augustine’s hymnlike stepwise melodies, streaming on and on in strophic form, assume an air of dogged perseverance. His close-mic’d singing has always coveted each breath, his ample room tone trying to bottle time and space. But it hits different now. “All my life’s a distant memory,” he muses on “Spirit of the Unknown.” “Apples on the tree/The sun over the sea/Another melody.” Angels in Plainclothes is infused with a new sense of the proper weight and proportions of things, an unfakeable profundity. He could have sung these words before. But now he can mean them.
