In a preview of single ‘Closer to Myself‘, we described how Rachel Angel‘s latest release Midnite Heart Attack is a record born of suffering away from home. Out via Ruzafa Records, the album was written upon Angel’s return to Florida after what she describes as a “trying bout of physical, emotional, and spiritual hardships abroad.” An attempt to re-center oneself after being uprooted for an extended period, triggered by the titular experience—”a defining moment of reckoning, upon which one is confronted with the decision to change or die”—in order to find peace and contentment once again.
The experience is set out with the opening title track, where illusions of youthful invulnerability are dispelled by the sudden onset of pain. “Was up midnight all around / I was twenty-two / Drinking till sundown / Like I was bulletproof,” Angel sings, driven onwards by the upbeat country rock tempo. “And now I’m grown / I think I can pull it / Ain’t got no home / Where I belong.” The self-deprecation is apparent but so to the spark of change. A genuine epiphany played back to us in real time. The moment when Rachel Angel decided to change and live.
I was losing my mindHalfway to heavenThey convinced me with their wordsThat I was sentenced
Which isn’t to say the rest of the album occurs within the seamless light of newfound conviction. For all its jaunty energy, ‘I Can’t Win’ is a wry look at transcendence, where salvation is still an uncertain thing, and ‘Baby Can I Come Home to You’ continues this doubt as something between a warning and a threat (“Gonna cry like it’s my birthday / And then you won’t know what to do”). The same applies regardless of the track’s tone. Bouncy country rock songs like ‘Daddy’ have mischievous sarcasm built in, whereas the likes of ‘Many Nights’ are less playful but still beholden by the potential for injury and loss.
Even ‘Closer to Myself’, a song all about moving on from uncertainty and longing, possesses a certain self-awareness. As though understanding change to be something other than linear. No epiphany can be total, some of the past’s worries will always remain. Closer ‘Candle’ burns with this gathered knowledge, its image of a candle in the wind capturing the brightness and fragility of anything in life. But while this means the good things are delicate and transient, it also highlights the cracks in the worst life has to offer too. Nothing is permanent or monolithic. Any flame can be snuffed out. The decision is which flickers to cup your hands around, and which to leave exposed.
Midnite Heart Attack is out now via Ruzafa Records and you can get it from the Rachel Angel Bandcamp page.