News
June 15 2015

The Weather Station’s Loyalty hits stores!


“The Weather Station is about to drop the best folk album of the year.” The Fader
“Stunningly beautiful.” The Guardian

“She’s a singer with an unmistakable and communicative voice, able to convey hope and hurt with equal clarity.” Pitchfork
“The resulting vignettes are intimate and charming.” Stereogum

In excess virtue lies danger, or at least limits to pragmatic action – it’s a lesson hard learned by anyone disillusioned by the erosion of youthful mythologies. Strict fealty to a fixed ideal of identity doesn’t do us any favours as adults. Loyalty, the third and finest album yet by The Weather Station (and the first for Spunk Records) wrestles with these knotty notions of faithfulness/faithlessness – to our idealism, our constructs of character, our memories, and to our family, friends, and lovers – representing a bold step forward into new sonic and psychological inscapes. It’s a natural progression for Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman’s acclaimed songwriting practice. Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris in the winter of 2014, in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), the record crystallises her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own.

Beyond the decaying decadence and vintage gear, the brokedown palace atmosphere of La Frette afforded a more significant interior luxury as well, one stated with brutal honesty in the stunning ‘Shy Women’: “it seemed to me that luxury would be to be not so ashamed, not to look away.” Accordingly, Loyalty brings a freshly unflinching self-examining gaze and emotional and musical control to The Weather Station’s songs. She is an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist – on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibes – but Lindeman has always been a songwriter’s songwriter, recognized for her intricate, carefully worded verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its discipline, its deliberate wording and exacting delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan.

To invoke Herman Melville, “extreme loyalty to the piety of love” can be a destabilizing force, a kind of bondage from which we must emancipate ourselves. The line is from his strange masterpiece Pierre, or the Ambiguities; The Weather Station’s Loyalty could quite easily support the same subtitle for the fascinating ways it navigates the deep canyons between certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt.