Suzanne Vega - Flying With Angels
Veteran singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega returns from a nearly decade-long hiatus with Flying With Angels, her tenth studio album. The project is a demonstration of her experience and her highly imaginative, but still very grounded and human songwriting.
The project starts very strongly, with the opening five-track run containing three of its strongest tracks - the opener, “Speaker’s Corner”, “Love Thief”, and “Chambermaid”, which interpolates and reimagines the classic 1966 Bob Dylan track, “I Want You”. The latter shows especially vividly that, despite her own lengthy career, Vega still maintains a very high level of respect for and connection to those who came before her, both in her lyricism and her composition. The second half of the record isn’t quite as good, feeling less focused, but still having some great moments, and ending very strongly with the graceful, beautiful closer, “Galway”. The main weaknesses of the album structurally are the third track, “Witch”, and the penultimate song, “Rats”, which feel somewhat out of place, breaking up the overall smooth, more relaxed mood that the rest of the tracklist carries.
The songwriting on the album is largely thoughtful, vivid and gentle, exploring a variety of personal and real-world themes through imagery and storytelling. Sometimes, Vega opts for very simple phrasing - which only gives what she’s saying more emotional resonance. For example, the song “Last Train From Mariupol”, makes a poignant allusion to the war in Ukraine, and the restless, perilous state of the world as a whole, while remaining within the context of the titular train. It’s a very powerful track, helped along by the slow, somber acoustic guitar instrumental and Vega’s wistful vocals.
The instrumentation on the album has quite a bit of variety to it, between softer, guitar-only songs and ones with more prominent drums. The production of the instruments is silky and clear; however, the mixing could have probably used another pass through, with Vega’s vocals feeling a bit disconnected from the instruments at times on certain tracks.
In conclusion, Flying With Angels is a solid body of work, especially as a late-career project for Suzanne Vega. Vega is a very engaging narrator, and the instrumentals accompanying her are pleasant and well put together. It has its flaws, but it ends up more than making up for them with its significant positives.
7.7/10
