Angelo De Augustine – ‘Toil and Trouble’ album review: the sweet sound of Sufjan Stevens’ protégé
Comparisons often seem demeaning for artists, and there is no doubt that Angelo De Augustine is a supreme musician in his own right, but when your girlfriend walks in the room and says that she loves the new Sufjan Stevens album you’re reviewing, it would be remiss of me not to mention just how close the two friends and collaborators sound. She did, however, cite that it was some of his best work for a while, so for fans of Stevens, Toil and Trouble will be a sweet treat.
Beginning with the quixotic ‘Home Town’, De Augustine conjures a feeling akin to wandering through the spring equivalent of a snow globe with the flutterings of nature adding wider context to the songwriter’s yearnings. Alas, as the Hieronymus Bosch-like cover art suggests, there is also a depth and darkness to the record, layering an undercurrent to the tender, filagreed topline of music.
This notion of toiling with the heaven and hell of home has a heavy on the album. It has good reason to. Opening with De Augustine’s reflection on a tragic mass shooting that occurred near his former residence is an unflinching way to delve into dreamy indie. But as the songwriter expresses: “It felt like if something like that could happen in this little town, then nowhere was safe,” he says. “And that feeling of not being safe anywhere is what led me to start thinking about a lot of themes on this record.”
He then wavers from this profound reflection towards a tale of UFO abduction in ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’. This contrast of themes is indicative of “the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be,” as De Augustine expresses. In its own strange way, that makes the dreamlike nature of the music very fitting. It isn’t dreamlike in the sunshine and rainbows sense but rather a pastiche of pillow-propped reality and the kaleidoscope of slumber.
To take that sleeping thought a step further, De Augustine’s delicate, poetic ways also shelter you from the same absurdity of the crooked real world with a cushion of quilted reconciliation. In that sense, it’s as truly dreamlike as a dreamlike album can get. This is typified by the strange waviness of the purely ambient ‘Healing Waters’.
While conceptual albums often struggle to offer up the catchiness of singles, and indeed, Toil and Trouble has just a hint of that, De Augustine also shows that he is more than capable of dropping a hook into obfuscated fantasy/reality with the luscious ‘Another Universe’. Layering simple acoustic strumming with a flurry of tinkling flourishes, he joyously flirts with over-production but happily skirts by on an endearing breeze of refined melody.
This point, in general, is one that typifies the triumph of Toil and Trouble—it is crowded by design, trying to muster a sort of 3D mirage of the world, but somehow, despite deploying glockenspiels, tubular bell-like tones, and myriad effects in the same verse, he never makes it overcrowded. He guides you through his strange pastures with a keen knack for knowing when to get back to the basics of what is essentially folk songwriting.
Also breaching the fantasy of the album in a musicological sense is the smattering of field recordings that he uses throughout. These punctuate the sustained synthesised textures with not only conceptual snippets of reality but also a more intriguing soundscape.
While some might criticise the obvious similarity to Stevens as pastiche, that seems harsh given the amount of himself he has ladled in the curious context of the album. Often bliss seems like a shallow and ignorant pursuit, but De Augustine’s breezy effort is buoyed with the sort of depth that you can drop an anvil into and never hear it hit the bottom, caught up somewhere amid the tendrils that tether his dreamworld to harsh reality. It is a world not far from a musical Pan’s Labyrinth.
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