Album Review: Myopia by Agnes Obel

Since 2010, Danish songwriter Agnes Obel has produced ghostly, moody chamber pop with configurations of piano, strings, and her own voice. Myopia, her fourth album, represents a new peak for her lush melancholy. Raised in Copenhagen by musical parents (her father was an instrument collector and former jazz guitarist, her mother a talented pianist), Obel studied music in high school, eventually dropping out to attend a program for budding producers.

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Danish singer-songwriter/composer Agnes Obel writes somber works of art surrounded by concepts of the reflective self. While 2012's Aventine took a more impressionistic approach to how we understand memory, 2016's Citizen of Glass questioned the role of privacy and how we expose ourselves to others. In Myopic, her fourth LP, Obel wanted to create in deep isolation without any outside influence, allowing herself to build self-trust as she experiments within a set of strengths and limitations.

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The follow-up to 2017's acclaimed Citizen of Glass, Myopia is the Danish singer/songwriter's fourth full-length effort and the second collection of songs self-produced in her Berlin home studio. Built on the competing themes of trust and doubt, the aptly named Myopia is Agnes Obel's most insular work to date, continuing in the vein of its predecessor with dramatic pitch-tuned vocals and Gothic chamber pop melodies. Obel has been refining her spectral nocturnes for a decade now, and Myopia, with its fever dream vistas and melancholy abyss, doesn't disappoint.

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Some albums reveal their treasures on first listen, others take longer to disclose their offerings. The albums released to date by Danish musician Agnes Obel have very much fallen into the latter category. Fourth album Myopia sees that trend deepen and intensify. The last we heard from Obel was back in 2016 when she released Citizen Of Glass.

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