The Toronto singer’s album is a country and gospel-infused meditation on death and mourning that flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal.
This Ontario singer-songwriter’s latest record is called Angels Of Death, and while the “death” part hangs heaviest on this song cycle about mortality, it’s Castle’s beguiling delivery that justifies the allusion to “angels.” In “Crying Shame,” Castle sounds like a ghost in her own song, floating above a steady drumbeat, a handful of piano notes, and wide swaths of open space.
“Angels of Death” is out May 18th, 2018 on Paradise of Bachelors / Idée Fixe
In the album’s highlight, “Texas,” Castle holds a magnifying glass up to her own experiences. “I go down to Texas/To kiss my grandmother goodbye,” she sings over bouncing acoustic guitar and percussion, before honing on the devastating detail: Her grandmother probably doesn’t remember, because “she forgets things.” It’s an example of Castle’s skill at taking a personal detail—traveling from a big city to a rural nowhere for a heavy and final farewell—and transforming it into something universal. At least that’s how it felt as the song joined me on a similar trip, from Los Angeles to Evansville, Indiana, where my own grandmother was dying from cancer.
The Fat Angel Sings 