Danish pianist Agnes Obel’s music is the sound of a haunted head and a haunted heart. Spectral keyboard lines and ghostly, sometimes pitch-shifted vocals float through her third album, which is less acoustic than her first two releases, and more processed, but sounds no less human and aching. Though it would be misleading to compare Obel’s music to Nico’s, Obel works a similar vein of inscrutable lyrics set to music that sounds more derived from chamber orchestras and gritty minor-key ballads than from most contemporary popular forms. Too, while Obel is frequently compared to Joanna Newsom in her eclectic approach to arrangements and her tendency to sparse component parts in the music, the songs on Citizen Of Glass feel more solid and lyrically more grounded in the known world, as on the gorgeous “It’s Happening Again” and “Trojan Horses.” This is music for dark seasons, both of the soul and of the earth.
—Eric Waggoner
