Weyes Blood, "Titanic Rising"

I get it, I really do.  It's rare to hear an album that sets out such a lush, gorgeous mood and can sustain it song after song.  The music billows and floats with a relaxed ambience that's found in peak Kate Bush and very little else.  Natalie Mering's vocals are a cross between Karen Carpenter and Joan Baez, soothing to the extreme, gentle above all else.  She has a voice you can listen to for hours, she can sing to an audience of thousands yet make person feel as though she is singing to them and them alone.   The album is usually classified as "baroque pop", which is the usual catchphrase for chanteuse-based music with string arrangements in a somewhat unconventional pop structure (i.e. beautiful, sweeping melodies but without obvious hooks and big choruses).  It definitely checks off all those boxes, but avoids the studio excesses that can alienate some listeners who prefer music that could have been conceivably been recorded in a studio apartment, rather than a big budget studio.

I think that Weyes Blood's music stirs the same emotions for her fans as Beach House's music does for me.  And this is where I get confused.  I don't hear what definitively separates "Titanic Rising" from many other vaguely lo-fi, ambitious-sounding indie pop records past and present.  Seeing how Lana Del Rey's album also finished near the top of many critics' lists, I sense a trend.  Both look for inspiration from classic song styles of yesteryear (when life was supposedly simpler) and project a contrarian mixture of optimism and cynicism. If they sing about love, are they being sincere or is all love simply doomed? It's a sign of the times, where life is fairly good overall but many people are convinced that we are on the inevitable downslope toward something immeasurably worse.  It's a good attitude to have for an artist in many genres.  But is the music really anything special?