Weather Station
Loyalty
Loyalty, the third and finest album yet by The Weather Station (and the first for Paradise of Bachelors) 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. 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 favors as adults. Loyalty, the third and finest album yet by The Weather Station (and the first for Paradise of Bachelors) 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 crystallizes 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. 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 favors as adults. 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 crystallizes 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. Lindeman describes La Frette, housed in an enormous, crumbling 19th-century mansion, as 'a secret garden, a place of enchantment and grace': walls mantled in ivy and lions, corridors piled high with discarded tape machines, old reels, and priceless guitars. As she puts it, 'Recording where we did meant we embraced beauty we weren't afraid of it being beautiful.' Like the record itself, it's a quietly radical statement, especially since certain passages achieve a diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station. The stacked vocal harmonies of Tapes, the drifting, jazz-inflected chording in Life's Work, and the glacial percussion in Personal Eclipse contribute to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier s Occasional Rain.
Tracklist
1. Way It Is, Way It Could Be
2. Loyalty
3. Floodplain
4. Shy Women
5. Personal Eclipse
6. Life's Work
7. Like Sisters
8. I Mined
9. Tapes
10. I Could Only Stand By
11. At Full Height
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