The Weather Station, 'Humanhood' Album Review

The Weather Station’s Consciousness Shifts from Global Concerns to Inner Turmoil on Humanhood

When the Weather Station released their critically acclaimed album Ignorance in 2021, Tamara Lindeman, the band’s driving force, became an accidental orator on the ongoing climate crisis. That record spoke of an ever-increasing sense of fear, decay and grief whilst also trying to hold onto the wonderment and beauty in nature. Four years on, the state of the world hasn’t shown much sign of improvement, and the Weather Station’s seventh record, Humanhood, shifts its focus from external anxieties to a paralyzing internal strife. In the process of reconnecting with herself, Lindeman fought to keep her head above water, her gaze searching for the sky.

Ignorance was a watershed moment for Lindeman, as it heralded a far more diversified and dexterous, jazz-inflected pop sensibility, taking a detour from the understated indie-folk that had steered the Canadian outfit’s earlier output. Songs like “Tried To Tell You,” “Parking Lot” and “Loss” boasted anthemic qualities that presented themselves not as polite invitations to dance, but as insistences of joyous movement. The growth in her lyrical narratives were matched with the impressive breadth of the record’s enveloping instrumentation, which required a broader field of musicians. However, just as fans had adapted to the Weather Station’s newfound exuberance, Lindeman promptly revisited the songs she’d penned during Ignorance’s conception, seeking closure on its themes with the sparser and delicate follow-up in 2022, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars (2022).

The sonic differences between those companion albums left audiences wondering what direction the Weather Station would explore next. For Lindeman, however, making those first steps didn’t feel possible. It wasn’t that the path was unclear–she simply didn’t have a vessel to make the journey. Her mind and body had become stagnant due to an extended period of chronic depersonalization. The grasp that she’d had on humanity and her identity—afforded to her, partly, through her songwriting—had slipped away. Before she could make progress with new music, she had to reconnect with all aspects of her being first.

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The corporeal form is elemental to Humanhood. “Your body fooled you,” Lindeman sings on “Body Moves,” a smooth, celestial jazz song that wraps around the listener with a welcome warmth emanating from an infectious piano and sax motif completed with softly brushed drums. A skilled lyricist and earnest performer, when Lindeman presents audiences with vignettes characterized by a defining feeling—her racing heart, an oppressive heat and the sweat it produces and a wave of calm that comes from listening to friends play music—those moments immediately come to life. The sincerity coursing through the song, elevated by the dynamic and rich arrangements, are so immediately effective in drawing you further into a world where its imperfections are highlighted instead of hidden.

Over the course of the record, we follow Lindeman as she finds healing in natural surroundings. Water, in particular, provides a crucial lifeline as expressed on the title track: “Maybe if I go down to the water / Maybe I can get back into my body.” In an interview preceding Humanhood’s release, Lindeman described the vitality and security she gets from being outdoors, calling the woods “the place [she’s] always felt the safest, the most free, or the most [herself].” “If no one can see or hear me, I feel very free,” she said. “When I write about the natural world, which I do on every record and often every song, it’s returning to the source or connecting back to the deepest thing for me.”

To communicate this in Humanhood’s musical identity, Lindeman returned to the more expansive and intricately layered arrangements that she and her band initially explored two albums ago. On this occasion, Lindeman left the door ajar for more air to enliven the potential for collaboration. Along with the Weather Station’s core recording band (Ben Whiteley, Kieran Adams, Karen Ng), Lindeman welcomed Sam Amidon, Drew Jurecka and Joseph Shabason to add even more color and depth to what are some of her most ambitious compositions to date. Elsewhere, Laurel Sprengelmeyer—the Montreal-based artist better known as Little Scream—is credited with providing lyric consultation. The fullness in the studio is felt in the deft turns these songs take, particularly in the closing moments of “Neon Signs” and “Sewing.” Where the former’s instrumentation disintegrates, making you feel like you’ve been haplessly deposited into a Salvador Dali painting, “Sewing” splits itself with a blanket of luminous synths which momentarily brings a sense of security before retreating and leaving Lindeman alone with nothing but the pulse of a fragile piano accompaniment. Just when you think you know how things will end, the band shifts gears to keep audiences on alert.

The melodic air coursing through these immensely captivating songs benefit from the space and spontaneity afforded to the musicians during the recording sessions. This is established from the moment we’re welcomed into the record, thanks to the fluttering of flute, piano and a steady synthesizer on the immersive opener “Descent.” An improvised piece, it serves as an extended intro for the propulsive stomp of “Neon Signs,” a song in which consumerism and recollections of desire are in conflict in “a world without trust.”

That striking introduction to Humanhood signals one of the more interesting ways the Weather Station’s sound has progressed from its previous material. A handful of soundscapes punctuate the tracklist and bring forth a further looseness to the overall musicality. “Descent” is one of three brief instrumental tracks acting as either an extended intro (along with “Passage”) or ambient pieces (“Fleuve” and “Aurora”); “Irreversible Damage” falls into the latter category, with a Radiohead-like inflection and artful composition that features a commanding hydrasynth paired with a steady beat and swirl of saxophone—a resplendent backdrop for the uninhibited conversation (courtesy of a friend of Lindeman’s) sewn into the fabric of the track.

Comparisons to Joni Mitchell have followed Lindeman from the beginning of her musical career, and there’s no denying the similarities in their cadences, especially when she engages the higher register of her vocal. However, Humanhood, evokes a far more compelling range of reference points, such as fellow Canadian outfit Destroyer due to the irresistible interplay of staggered piano, bass groove and sax on “Mirror.” Elsewhere, the title track, one of the record’s grander statements, feels like an extension of the thematic and tonal stylings of Laurie Anderson, or of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s recent work on The Ones Ahead.

Humanhood is weighted with Lindeman’s process of clawing back to herself—signposted by moments of mis-trust, uncertainty and loneliness—and seeking out simple foundations, such as nature and creativity, that elicit a sense of grounding. Listening to the record, there are certain recurring words that announce themself amongst the textured compositions: body, water, trust, knot. However, no word features more frequently in the runtime than “pain.” Sometimes, Lindeman describes the pain as shattering or physical, a symptom of loneliness; in other moments it’s fundamental: “My pain is ordinary, I’m just like anybody.”

That visceral ache is effectively harnessed across the album, culminating with the realization that, to live fully, suffering—and everything outside of ourselves that we can’t control—is essential in illuminating the good among us. This is key to Lindeman’s contemplative closing statement “Sewing,” on which she’s uniting the different patterns of her life (made from “pride and shame, beauty and guilt”) to make a blanket. In bringing these contrasting elements together, she appreciates the comfort in seeing a full and fulfilling image of what the future might hold. In the end, Lindeman is able to be carefree again: “I’m taking pictures of the sky again, I don’t know why—I guess I wanted to.”

The Weather Station’s Consciousness Shifts from Global Concerns to Inner Turmoil on Humanhood

Revisiting Ignorance’s infectious palette and embracing improvisation, Tamara Lindeman overcomes pain and uncertainty to reconnect with herself on her seventh album.