Lindeman is eloquently undone by the flight of a bird on Parking Lot, by the blood-red of the sunset. Her first weapon against all of this is exposing the lie we live every day – that everything might be all right. “He had permission,” Lindeman recounts coolly, as strings scythe around her, “permission by words, permission of thanks, permission of laws, permission of banks, white tablecloth dinners, convention centres – it was all done real carefully,” she seethes. Gradually, though, the song reveals itself to be a dissection of an economy based on theft – and our complacency or connivance in it. These are sound words for anyone traumatised by a break-in. “The robber don’t hate you,” Lindeman advises. The album’s opening track, Robber, sounds at first as if it’s describing the aftermath of a burglary. It’s about the pain of gaps: between those who taste the emergency, and those – often beloved, sometimes just jerks on the internet – who do not. And so Separated is not just about two people increasingly sleeping back-to-back it’s about everyone carrying on as normal when we need radical, systemic change, immediately. Weather stations are there to log the hard evidence in the mercury to record the very real, very slow crawl of the coming apocalypse. Whatever the people in her songs might be feeling about others, this is an artist who superimposes a second breakup on top of the first: anguish at the wanton evisceration of the natural world. The dissonant strings speak the pain the lyrics stop short of voicing.īut even though there are divorce court proceedings on the stark piano ballad Trust, Ignorance is no ordinary breakup album. Even more galling, her other half sees no wound at all. Lindeman’s mild tones dissolve into a soprano whisper to confide “my stupid desire to heal every rift, every cut”. Watch the video for Atlantic by the Weather Station. A percolating pop tune, Separated, lists all the distances growing between two lovers – because of “all the work we had to do”, and “the things you thought you knew”.
This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to. But Lindeman can sometimes feels like Christine and the Queens’ bookish older sister too. Talk Talk is an inevitable reference point, as well as fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell producer Marcus Paquin (Arcade Fire) deserves a shout out.
Here, she embraces synths, strings and percussion, making borderline soft rock sprinkled with the kind of intuitive, expressive instrumentation – courtesy of eight musicians – that Bill Callahan has brought to his most recent records.
Thanks to a proclivity for acoustic instruments, previous Weather Station albums have found Lindeman making folk-derived songs. “I will not help you not to feel, to tell yourself it was not real,” she croons. Tried to Tell You watches someone else’s pain closely. A song such as Atlantic finds her breathless: “‘My god,’ I thought, ‘what a sunset’,” she exhales. “Got in the car, and the cold metallic scent of snow caught in my throat as I reached out to turn on the radio,” she sings, just one of a handful of times this former folk musician and child actor resembles Bruce Springsteen. This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to
#WEATHER POP MEANING FULL#
And yet: here is a left-field pop record full of muted fury and despair one that never howls outright, but trickles out emotion in careful dropperfuls – in a partial vignette here, or a quiet epiphany there. You don’t want to break open the music box in order to describe its workings. Such is the will-o’-the-wisp quality of Ignorance that it feels vulnerable to the glare of forensics.
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