Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
On her fourth album as The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman reinvents, and more deeply roots, her extraordinary, acclaimed song-craft, framing her precisely detailed, exquisitely wrought prose-poem narratives in bolder and more cinematic musical settings. The result is her most sonically direct and emotionally candid statement to date. The most fully realised statement to date from Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman. Self-titled and self-produced, the album unearths a vital new energy from Lindeman’s acclaimed song writing practice, marrying it to a bold new sense of confidence. “I wanted to make a rock and roll record,” Lindeman explains, “but one that sounded how I wanted it to sound, which of course is nothing like rock and roll.”
The result is a spirited, frequently topical tour de force that declares its understated feminist politics, and its ambitious new sonic directions. Lindeman’s song writing has always been deconstructive, subtly undermining the monoliths of genre with her sly sense of complexity and irony. She has generally been characterised as a folk musician, and yet with its subtext of community and tradition, the term “folk” has never quite fit The Weather Station’s work; the songs are too specific and lacerating. So appropriately, Lindeman’s so-called “rock and roll record” suspiciously stares down those genre signifiers—big, buzzing guitars, thrusting drums—and interweaves horror-movie strings and her keening, Appalachian-tinged vocal melodies.
‘The Weather Station’ is her most direct and candid record, and the first one to include tracks one might characterise as pop songs. Throughout, the record grapples with some of the darkest material Lindeman has yet approached: it is, according to her, the first album on which she touches on her personal experiences of mental illness. And yet the gesture inherent to the record is one of unflinching embrace. Despite it all, the characters “fall down laughing, effervescent, and all over nothing, all over nothing.” “Well, I guess I got the hang of it” she sings wryly, “the impossible.” By saying more than ever before, The Weather Station seeks to reveal the unnamable, the unsayable void that lies beneath language and relationships. It’s willfully messy and ardent and hungry. And that, perhaps, is very rock and roll, after all.