Review: Kris Angelis submerges in heartrending seas of pain on new EP, ‘That Siren, Hope’

Carson McCullers paints humanity’s misery in beautiful and fragile brushstrokes. 1940’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter slits open life and times of a 1930s mill town, and the imagery stuns in muted, deeply-troubling melancholy. Its peoples trudge through sticky tragedies as best they can, often tucking away any dreams or aspirations of a better life in the folds of yellow-stained sheets, cracked floral wallpaper, and faded, flecked, and ramshackle homesteads. Folk singer-songwriter Kris Angelis‘ new EP could very well exist within that same weary and downtrodden world, her watercolor wordplay fraying at the seams and her angelic, otherworldly vocal delivering blow after blow. That Siren, Hope completely immerses the listener into a murky sea of sorrow, awash in acoustic hues and startling poignancy.

There’s a minimalistic framework by which Angelis is able to gut and root out the insides, and she moves with the agility of a panther, tip-toeing along string-bound arrangements and going totally undetected. “I Hope I Never Fall in Love Again” scorches what’s left of her broken heart, a crackling guitar barely keeping her afloat. “I’m running out of time! I gotta let you go! Stop living in your shadow…” she sings, first a sky-bending howl and then a faint whisper. She rips open her chest like a rusted birdcage, and the heartache careens away as a flock of cockatiels. The catharsis relinquishes her from the past, but a new disturbance brews on the horizon. “It’s hard to be brave with the wind in your face / And stormy clouds raging at you,” she consoles herself. In the same turn, she suits up for the downpour, knowing full well it’ll probably get much worse before it gets better.

The title song straddles the before and after the storm, the uncertain limbo, shrouded with darkness with a needlepoint of light piercing through. “I thought that shine was a lighthouse / But it was just that siren, hope / Sang me to sleep / Yeah, she taught me dream / Turns out her song is just a joke,” she washes her skin in a beautiful elixir of poeticism and string-spun instruments. Angelis once again wields her vocal as a sharp blade, castrating her troubles and relieving her misery-addled mind of the pressure. While danger lurks behind every corner, or so she believes, she pushes through the anxiety of the unknown, and the other side flutters open to reveal a coastline, and fresh start, she wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. With “If I Can’t Have What I Want,” she admits she can’t feel much of anything these days, paralyzed by fear, yet somehow “still standing here,” she confides.

That Siren, Hope swallows you whole. It’s heart-melting and taps into universal miseries, fears, and truths about what it means to be human. Kris Angelis is a siren herself, but one that seeks to teach, guide, and heal us from our worst enemy: ourselves.

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