‘Titanic Rising’: The record that tragically gets better as the world ends
No other event of the 20th century can so accurately illustrate contemporary society’s doomed trajectory with such bleak familiarity as the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. Trapped in a neoliberal death spiral as the world heats up and global wealth is ever concentrated in fewer hands, the political failure fuelling the dense fog of malaise over the Western World finds a queasy analogy in the ocean liner disaster, a venture fuelled by reckless hubris with devastating consequences to a working-class having scant access to safety resources or a contingency plan.
It’s a thematic device weaved into 2019’s Titanic Rising. The fourth album from Californian singer Weyes Blood, real name Natalie Mering, its psychedelic baroque washes and surreal melancholy scores a wistfully fraught, lyrical navigation of sorrow and turmoil wrapped in a reassuring pointer to healing resolve.
While also exploring love and the nature of faith, a potent topic considering Blood’s born-again Pentecostal upbringing, Titanic Rising ambiguously posits that the political machinations built to sustain society’s rigid strata are born from Western desires to conquer nature, and following flash floods and intense wildfires, nature’s fighting back.
“You know, considering the situation we’re in right now, it feels like man’s hubris has gotten so rampant,” Blood told Radio Milwaukee around the album’s release. “It feels like there’s no real acknowledgement of our lack of dominion over nature, even though it’s becoming so apparent, and we have no idea what we’re doing”.
She added: “Maybe we do, and maybe people are incredibly evil and malicious, but I just find it hard to believe that all the climate change deniers are comfortable with the earth losing its oxygen and scorching up in flames or something. I really think that they are that dense and they really believe in conspiracies.”
It’s hard to shake off the nihilism. With President Donald Trump signing an Executive Order to commence the withdrawal process of the Paris Accords while flanked by the country’s tech billionaires signals a flagrant foreshadowing that America is going to be steered straight into the figurative iceberg, guided with glee from an aggrieved reactionary faction who’ll welcome the planet sinking into oblivion so long as it triggers a few libs.
The hideous implications to the global south and the country’s working class are grimly encapsulated with Titanic’s abysmal preparation for its ‘third-class’ passengers. Trapped as the lower decks filled with water, the mainly immigrant and working-class were left without any plan and little sign of help, 75% of the women and children surviving and as low as 20% of the men. Rich white folk given lifeboats while the rest fight over each other to survive is a grimly fitting illustration of late-stage capitalism’s grim lurch toward climate breakdown and the test of civilisation’s veneer.
“I think it’s a sad time where opposed to a ship crashing into an iceberg and sinking, we’re melting the icebergs and sinking civilization’s predominantly kind of, third-world small areas that don’t have the infrastructures to deal with those kinds of things,” Blood confessed. Hopefully in years to come, Titanic Rising‘s attention is due to its inventive pop arrangements and poetic songwriting over any future prescience.
