Album Review: The Darkest Skies Are The Brightest by Anneke van Giersbergen

To begin: Anneke van Giersbergen has delivered the best album of her solo career with The Darkest Skies Are The Brightest. It’s needless to ‘build up’ to that evaluation when it’s so delightfully obvious even on a first listen.

Sonically, the album is cozy like a 1970’s wood-paneled den—there’s Anneke on the sofa just across the room, voice prominently centered (as it should be), elegant instrumentation floating from shadowed corners. Rich, resonating tones of nickel-wound strings and wood transcend the tired timbres of most ‘acoustic’ or ‘stripped down’ song sets. Restrained percussion and occasional horns or strings accentuate; subtleties permeate each track, ensuring maximum re-listenability. Headphones are almost a requirement.

As for the songs themselves: Anneke’s arranging sensibilities and lyrical dexterity are on the rise. Hear how she places the tricky lexeme “diabolically” in “Agape,” or the unexpected intrusion of “There is no one to show me how heaven and earth will collide” in “My Promise.” Meanwhile, “Lo and Behold” incorporates stomp-on-the-floor rhythm, handclaps, demi-chamber music interludes, and majestic chorus vocals. It’s a pocket symphony in under 3 minutes, and even manages to pack in one of the album’s most straightforward expression of theme in the lyric “I might be dwelling in solitude/But if there is one thing I’ve understood/You and I—our precious child/Is the true triangle that is Love.” Such straightforward expressions appear with both frequency and care as Anneke sidesteps the hackneyed in favour of a ‘relationship album’ that values the expressive over the didactic. This is not an album ‘about’ love in jeopardy—this is an album ‘from’ a troubled heart. And it is from this ‘inside’ perspective that one sees the truth that, indeed, The Darkest Skies Are The Brightest.