With her seventh album as the Weather Station, singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman gets dangerously close to making the 2020s version of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark that so many modern indie artists dream of coming up with. It’s an album that beautifully mixes pop, folk, rock, jazz, and ambient music, taking on moments of personal crisis, transition, and catharsis with engrossing poetic resolve.
On the Weather Station’s widely acclaimed 2021 album, Ignorance, Lindeman focused many of her lyrics on the impending doom of climate change. This time the challenges are closer to home. “I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy — or just lazy/Why can’t I get off this floor and think straight anymore,” she sings against the tense piano and pulsing rhythm track of “Neon Signs,” which opens into a gently rocking meditation about trying to make sense of a world where experience, desire, community, and passion all feel weirdly alien and commodified. “Everybody swears they need you/And only you to make the buy,” she sings.
The rest of the LP is spent reckoning her way out of the predicament. On “Window,” the music takes flight as she sings about literally going out of her own window to get perspective. On “Body Moves,” with its coiled groove, prayerful organ, and softly ascending melody, she sings about the way we try to trick ourselves into feeling better than we are. The title track starts off sounding like gamelan music, then turns into a busy-grooved evocation on finding catharsis by going for a swim at a busy beach, creating her own ecstatic iteration of traditional baptismal blues imagery. “Irreversible Damage” begins with breath exercises and revolves into a monologue that analogizes coming to terms with personal and environmental collapse — set to a skittering track and kiting melody that lands somewhere between Stereolab and Rickie Lee Jones. The slow, muted “Lonely” begins as a study in forlorn isolation, before homing in on the grounding image of making music with trusted friends in a favorite bar.
That sense of community comes through in the lavishly textured music, which is intricately arranged but still driven by organic interplay, especially in the way Lindeman’s piano playing and Karen Ng’s various reed and woodwind accompaniments glance off the agile propulsion of the Weather Station’s ace rhythm section. By the album’s six-minute closing track, “Sewing,” Linderman is beginning to stitch together a guarded notion of how to keep moving forward “from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.” It’s just her very low-key piano, some empathetic drum taps, and a bit off offhanded minimalist orchestral shading. “All I can do is sew it into this undulating thing, whatever it is I’m making with you,” she sings. Whatever that ends up being in the long term, this is the kind of album where such an epiphany feels uniquely earned.
