Phildel’s Wave Your Flags is a powerfully emotional album that manages to surpass the bar set by her acclaimed debut in 2013 with The Disappearance of the Girl. Her new album focuses on similar themes from her first: independence, grief, and needing to speak one’s truth. With each track she cycles effortlessly from brooding, turbulent reflections of what she’s lost to celebratory, upbeat anthems of coming into her own. Phildel poured three years of her life into this album, and it’s paid off in that she’s created a beautiful experience that combines her gentle, pure voice with heavy themes that will have listeners playing Wave Your Flags on repeat.
The adversities Phildel has faced strongly influence her sound and her lyricism; she grew up under the control of an abusive and religious stepfather who enforced a ban on music in her household. Her recent attempt to apprehend him through the justice system ended with no conviction, and since then she’s made the decision to estrange herself from her mother and sister. Wave Your Flags depicts a journey of intense pain and healing, especially in tracks like “Lamb,” an ethereal lullaby written about her mother. Other songs like “A Great Wave” offer a vulnerable glimpse into a night where she imagines walking into the River Thames, overwhelmed with emotion over the failed conviction of her stepfather.
There’s a degree of minimalism to Phildel’s tracks where she gives extended pauses a chance to breathe and allows background instrumentals to be simple but effective. This lets Phildel’s voice be the focal point, and she experiments with this in small ways. By using a vocoder to warble her voice in “A Great Wave,” for example, she creates a haunting, ghostly vibe for it. She also shows her adaptability in “Glide Dog,” a gory fantasy of simmering anger towards toxic relationships. The sultry tone she evokes when she sings, “I need more blood than you can pour, love” is new to her sound, but she manages to make it her own. Additionally, she plays with echoes all throughout the album, but they’re especially powerful in “Floods” where she manipulates them to produce an entire choir featuring only her own voice.
A particular strong suit of the album is that it both begins and ends on a huge crescendo. It’s obvious that Phildel meticulously arranged and put thought into the organization of Wave Your Flags. “Electric Heights,” for example, opens the album with an infectious beat that begs to be replayed. When listening to the final track, “Glorious,” it’s easy to understand how Phildel got her start in the music industry by writing songs for commercials. It finishes off the album on a major high note, both in pitch and with an incredibly catchy and pop-like sound. “Glorious” also imprints us with the parting reminder: “Here, I win my day / I make my kill upon the grave / And need no hero to be saved.”
Phildel bares her heart in each track of Wave Your Flags, making it a breathtaking experience from start to finish. When taken at face value, the album offers catchy tunes and synthy beats for those wanting exactly that. But for those wanting something deeper, her tracks are full of thought-provoking lyrics that read like poetry. Although not as well-known as she deserves, Phildel proves again with this album that she’s a force to be reckoned with and that her sound is akin to a fine wine; it continues to improve with age and maturity.
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.
