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Songwriter Tamara Lindeman alias The Weather Station: doom and gloom contrasted with the greatest possible beauty
Photo:
Daniel Dorsa
Album of the week:
The Weather Station - "Ignorance"
You want to experience some music live immediately, surround yourself completely with it.
You want to be carried away by these reliably driving Fleetwood Mac drums, ponder every piano chord and organ accent that is dabbed into the atmosphere.
And then the voice of this singer: light and gentle, longingly plaintive, but also deeply calming.
Suddenly you dare to breathe again.
Well, enough swindling, that won't work for the time being: no live concerts foreseeable, at least not IRL, so
in real life
.
Which doesn't make The Weather Station's new album seem any less spectacular.
Perhaps we should, no,
must
you play it at home just loud enough to penetrate every nuance to be embraced.
The Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman is behind the band name.
The 36-year-old, a sideline actress (as Tamara Hope), spent the first years of her musical career freeing herself from the image of a very competent Joni Mitchell copy; she succeeded most confidently on her last album, which was released in 2017.
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Ignorance
Artist: The Weather Station
Label: FAT POSSUM
Artist: The Weather Station
Label: FAT POSSUM
approx € 11.54
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05.02.2021 8.42 p.m.
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Now she is returning with a new band (including two percussionists, saxophonist Brodie West), an opulent sound and a new mission.
For a “weird winter” she devoured books and texts about climate change and sketched song sketches on a toy keyboard, she told the New York Times.
At the same time, she began to attend Fridays for Future demonstrations and to moderate a series of talks with musicians and activists on the climate issue.
Sketches and climate worries ultimately became one of the most thrilling pop albums of the year to date: »Ignorance«, says Lindeman, refers to the fact that her generation grew up aware that climate change is real, but was told: The apocalypse is coming, but hey, just keep doing your thing!
She symbolizes this broken relationship to reality, by which she herself is affected, among other things by a neat suit made of shards of mirror, which she wears to the album in her self-staged video clips, a walking disco ball reflector.
Not
out of the woods
, but right in the middle of a mess.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
The Weather Station: Trust
Albertine Sarges: Free Today
Cardi B: Up
Tkay Maidza (with Yung Baby Tate): Kim
Adrian Younge: The American Negro
Morcheeba: Sounds Of Blue
Sturle Dagsland: Waif
Martha Rose: The Blacksmith Courted Me
The government: let the goose out
Rainald Grebe: Meganice time
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
The lyrics are about this dissonance, about decadence in the face of disaster.
"Atlantic", dissolute and roaring, wrestles with red wine-red ocean waves in
sunset
and with wanting to ignore the worrying media headlines.
At the same time, however, it is also about the inability to grasp the fragility of the environment: “How can I touch this softest petal, softest stem, softest leaf, bending, green, in my palm?
Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind, ”she sings.
»Robber«, a troubled, nervous jazz flow, is about the naivety towards abstract corporations like Exxon not to regard them as lousy future robbers.
She feels as useless as a tree in a city park, she sings in another song, "standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart."
Of course you could make fun of the fact that a band called The Weather Station is now emphatically dealing with the general weather situation, the "emotional aspects of climate change," as Lindeman puts it.
And sometimes the baroque music, which contrasts this doom and gloom with the greatest possible beauty, can be overwhelmed by itself, then it no longer only reminds of the great, thematically similar »Titanic Rising« album by colleague Weyes Blood, but above all of the saturated one Eighties radio skirt from "Tango In The Night" to stay with Fleetwood Mac.
But in its best moments (for example, “Trust”), “Ignorance” pervades the sublime “Spirit of Eden” of Talk Talk.
Impossible to ignore.
(9.0)
Listened briefly:
Albertine Sarges - "The Sticky Fingers"
The music is as dazzling and remote as the exotic deep sea fish in the song "Fish".
You think: B-52's?
Talking Heads?
Funk bass?
Flute !?
But the themes of the Berlin artist Albertine Sarges on her debut, which is filled to the brim with gorgeous post-punk tunes, are not at all yesterday: It's about feminist awakening,
conveyed with dazzlingly cheerful
Sesame Street Chutzpah
.
Great
.
(8.2)
Sturle Dagsland - »Sturle Dagsland«
Oh, a new Björk album!
Uh, no: Sturle Dagsland, the most interesting Norwegian pop artist at the moment, sings in "Dreaming" and "Waif" as bright and exuberant as the Iceland fairy, but on his debut he can also growl like a stud troll ("Kusanagi"): Soft, mystical folk and hard, experimental noise, played on instruments like Guzheng, Mbira, Duduk or Marxophone.
Cathartic.
(7.5)
The government - "There"
For some, the lockdown releases unimagined energy.
Not always with the incumbent federal government, but at least with the government that the musician Tilman Rossmy has led in various coalitions for almost 30 years, including long breaks.
»Da« patters, scrambles and krautrocks very groovy on the subject of self-discovery, floating freely from the home studio.
Like Dinsosaur Jr. in yoga
.
(7.2)
Foo Fighters - "Medicine At Midnight"
Singer and ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl postulated that Bowie's “Let's Dance” was the eleventh album of the Foo Fighters: a dance plate, upbeat, funny and groovy.
That
would have been something!
You can dance to "Shame Shame" (file under: Maroon 5) or "Love Dies Young" (file under: Kiss), but it's best to still have a beer mug in hand in the stadium.
So rather awkward.
File under: Whitesnake.
(3.0)
