Album Review: The Weighing of the Heart by Colleen

Though her career began with the samples- and loops-dominated Everyone Alive Wants Answers, the arc of Cécile Schott's albums has gradually moved toward the acoustic, now culminating with The Weighing of the Heart, an album that, unlike her previous efforts, features the most acoustic instrument of all: the human voice. Not only does Schott's breathy vocals resound through much of The Weighing of the Heart, but she sings real words, which on first blush marks a radical shift in her oeuvre. While her methodology remains largely the same (sounds are looped and folded onto and across one another), The Weighing of the Heart no longer traffics exclusively in the lonely sonorities of her previous albums, which, at their shoegazing apogees, crest toward the Kantian sublime.

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To listen to a Colleen album is to take a deep breath and release it as slowly as you possibly can, to quieten your mind, to still the world around you and your beating heart. That this, Cécile Schott's fourth release, should suddenly emerge from a six-year silence then seems entirely logical. And like that rare friend you've known forever but seldom see, a first listen sets you right back in the goodness, hardly any time at all has passed and nothing has been lost or dulled.

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