Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, which lets it freeze over faster and more completely than any of the others. Matthew Azrieli builds “Angola,” named for a small town on Erie’s shore southwest of Buffalo, around that coming freeze.
The song opens with summer already gone and a drive through Western New York, lake wind shoving at the narrator’s SUV on the way to Angola and a better version of himself. Then the seasons start to age. In the autumn verse, falling leaves crawl at his feet like babies while he shakes in the cold like an old man shuffling through the pile, so an entire lifespan passes in one stanza. Winter finishes the job, arriving as “a colossal seasonal heart attack” that leaves nothing behind except a lake turned to ice.
The final verse rewinds. Summer’s glow carries on, the narrator promises everyone will stay forever young, and the car is back on the road to Angola. Through every season, he repeats the same two words of reassurance four times in a row, like someone talking himself through bad weather.
Azrieli taught himself guitar by listening to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan and Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, then studied classical guitar at the McGill Conservatory, and the sad acoustic folk of “Angola” carries that lineage. The similes are the song’s best asset: crawling babies and a trembling old man fit a year’s worth of mortality into a few lines, and the stubborn return to summer gives the sadness somewhere hopeful to land. Azrieli splits his time between Montreal and Nashville and clearly knows long drives, and this one ends in summer with the lake wide open.
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