The Weather Station Is Opting Out of the Algorithm
“Right now, it feels like we’re at this peak of disposability in all art.”
All over the Weather Station’s new album Humanhood, people watch each other from across chasms of despair and struggle to breach the gap. In bandleader Tamara Lindeman’s empathetic but unflinching view, the root of this disconnection is both interpersonal and societal—the way a blank stare can feel like the end of the world. On the moonlit standout “Mirror,” she uses images of climate destruction to evoke relationship strife—or is it vice versa?
I don’t make the rules, I just watch them unfurl
Like the smoke always rising from the fires of the world
You were dousing your fields in chemical rain
You were cutting my arm to transcend your own pain.
Some people write love songs, others write protest songs. For Lindeman, there is little difference between the two.
Lindeman, 39, recorded Humanhood in the same Toronto studio and with many of the same players who contributed to her astonishing 2021 breakout album Ignorance, which turned the Weather Station from a folk-rock project with an uncommonly poetic songwriter to a more ambitious endeavor that drew influence from avant-garde jazz, electronic dance music, and anthemic pop. Both records combine the mechanical propulsion of contemporary dance and pop with vocal phrasing and improvised instrumental passages that flow and meander across the rhythm section’s rigid barlines. They hold all sorts of apparent contradictions in delicate balance: rigidness and flow, composition and improvisation, the mechanical and the human.
Though Lindeman’s songs are often solemn, she is a lively and enthusiastic conversationalist, peppering trenchant societal critiques with jokey asides, and departing on occasional tangents whose relation to the subject at hand only becomes clear in retrospect. At times, her brain seems to be 10 steps ahead of her mouth, waiting around the bend for the pace of talk to catch up.
