Since 2010, Danish songwriter Agnes Obel has produced ghostly, moody chamber pop with configurations of piano, strings, and her own voice. Myopia, her fourth album, represents a new peak for her lush melancholy. Raised in Copenhagen by musical parents (her father was an instrument collector and former jazz guitarist, her mother a talented pianist), Obel studied music in high school, eventually dropping out to attend a program for budding producers. As with her three previous albums, she wrote, recorded, mixed, and produced Myopia at her home studio in Berlin.
Myopia means “nearsightedness,” a title Obel chose to reflect her insular approach to music. Where some children might keep a private diary, Obel played solo piano: “I always had a different style of music I liked to play just by myself,” she’s said. Myopia lives in this solitude, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. Myopia uses vocal manipulation and murky instrumentation for ambient effect, painting the gloom in hues of rich blue and grey.
The effect is present from earliest moments on the album, as on “Broken Sleep,” where Obel’s voice dips in and around plucked strings as she instructs, “Dream me a dream soft as a pillow.” She passes the phrase “dream me a dream” back and forth with herself, alternating between a long e, like dreem, and a short e, like drem. Elsewhere she experiments with textured vocal layering and muddled, rippling warbles. On “Promise Keeper,” pronunciation takes a backseat in favor of delicate vocalizations. At times her voice leaps over itself, like cresting dolphins. When Obel sings the album’s title on “Myopia,” the word simply melts into the rain of compressed drums and strings, barely detectable.
Myopia recalls the gauziness of Grouper, or the poetry of Kate Bush, but the way the album forms its own strange landscape suggests that Obel is more interested in her own musical planet than any shared reality. She’s motivated, perhaps, by what she’s described as a discomfort with social media and the pressure of a culture where “we expect everyone to be open and made of glass.” Myopia, with its atmospheric piano, shadowy vocal effects, and persistent tension, resists this kind of visibility. These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.
Buy: Rough Trade
