Agnes Obel - Citizen Of Glass (2016)

Once artists find a formula for success, they often stick to it: if it isn’t broken, and all that. After two hugely successful albums – Philharmonics (2010) and Aventine (2013) – you might expect Agnes Obel to stay with what she knows, especially as she is famously superstitious. (Obel records in the same home studio, on the same chair, on the same pianos, singing into the same microphones so as not to tempt fate after earlier successes.) Her new album, Citizen of Glass, however, is markedly different from previous efforts, both conceptually and instrumentally.

Whilst her trademark ethereal vocals and cinematic song structures are still intact (so too is her love of strings and piano), the album is stronger conceptually than earlier works. Taking the term ‘gläserner bürger’, from the study of social sciences in German, Berlin-based Obel explores the idea of the ‘glass citizen’. In medical and legal spheres, the term is used to explain how much we know of a person’s history and their state level of privacy. In this time of increased social observation, she examines how we obsess with the lives of others as well as our own, and the ultimate suffocation, jealously and inadequacy such observations bring. “There is an increasing sense in this world that you have to make yourself a bit of glass,” Obel says of the concept. “To be willing to open up, use yourself as material, and not just if you’re an artist or a musician. If made of glass, we know everything.”

‘A grip that will hold / So tight and close / Around my throat with / The weight of all our lives’, Obel sings on album opener ‘Stretch your Eyes’. Squealing cellos, tight strings and tip-toe percussion create Hitchcock-like tension throughout this enigmatic track. Seemingly exploring the suffocation brought about by being citizens of glass, the song is undercut with glass-like musical fragility in what feels like a warning: if we make ourselves too transparent, what is left? If we put ourselves under too much scrutiny, will we ultimately shatter?

Songs ‘Familiar’ and ‘Mary’ take this a step further, containing protagonists who are indeed broken and exposed. “In my house the silence rang so loud / Under doorways, through the hallway down / Waiting for the secret to grow out / Oh what we do when no one is around,” Obel sings on ‘Mary’, making listeners feel almost guilty for intruding on such personal subject matter. Tense strings and faint percussion alongside Obel’s delicate vocals mean the sound of glass is again never far away on either song. - Elizabeth Aubrey

TRACKLIST
01. Stretch Your Eyes (5:11)
02. Familiar (3:56)
03. Red Virgin Soil (2:43)
04. It’s Happening Again (4:21)
05. Stone (3:57)
06. Trojan Horses (5:34)
07. Citizen Of Glass (2:49)
08. Golden Green (4:00)
09. Grasshopper (2:38)
10. Mary (5:48)