Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner will release When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day the follow up to her critically acclaimed S/T debut, on CD / LP / DL August 11th in Europe and August 12th in North America via Sub Pop. The album will also be available on August 8th in Finland via Kioski.
When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day, which includes the highlights “Oak Tree,” “1-2-3-4,” “What Love Looks Like,” and “The Dirt,” was produced and recorded by Vladislav Delay (Luomo, Uusitalo) at Shark Reef Studio in Hailuoto, Finland. The album also features additional instrumentation from Academy and Grammy award-winning composer Craig Armstrong (Ray; Moulin Rouge) on the songs “Ellipsis” and “Goodnight”.
You can now watch When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day’s official first video (and lead-off track) for “Oak Tree,” directed by Mirel Wagner & Aki Roukala. Stereogum had this to say about the clip, “The first single, “Oak Tree,” is absolutely cavernous, as Wagner intones her dark tale, singing from the perspective of a buried corpse as multi-tracked vocals gently moan in the distance. It’s a devastating piece of music that nearly demands a listen on headphones.”
Mirel Wagner will support When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day with a 2014 fall European and North American tour. Preceding those dates, Wagner has scheduled a series of summer shows throughout Finland, which includes a very special album release show on Friday, August 8th at Helsinki’s Flow Festival. For a complete list of shows please visit Mirel Wagner’s subpop.com tour dates page.
Mirel Wagner’s When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day is now available for preorder from Sub Pop Mega Mart, iTunes, and Amazon. Vinyl preorders from megamart.subpop.com will receive the limited edition “Loser” LP, and a seven-inch of exclusive non-album tracks “Love Song” and “Come Away Child” (while supplies last).”
About Mirel Wagner’s When The Cellar Children See The Light Of Day:
“I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing,” writes the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney of his solitary profession in his poem “Personal Helicon”.
These words always come to mind when listening to the music of Mirel Wagner. There is a defiant air of unflinching bravery in her carefully chosen words and the skeletal chords of her acoustic guitar. Her songs are like smooth, polished black pebbles, thrown into a cold bottomless pond, drops of life that set the darkness rippling.
Squeezing the last drop of life from a worn out genre, her acoustic balladry is as far as you’ll get from clichéd coffee house folk. It has more to do with the primeval oily darkness of Swans than the folksy bonhomie of Bob Dylan.
When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day is an impressive set of songs, uniform and cohesive. Wagner ditched a set of older new songs and wrote the majority of the songs up on the peninsula of Hailuoto in northern Finland, in an old log cabin next to the family home of Wagner’s manager Aki Roukala. The isolation and relative starkness of the place (no central heating, no electricity) helped bring out the songs (read more at Sub Pop).
Vandala Magazine 