“You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows”
The words of Bob Dylan in his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ Almost exactly sixty years later we certainly need The Weather Station to point us in the direction of the quality, strength, emotional depth, defiance, resilience, and relevance that can lie at the heart of the very best contemporary music.
The project of the Toronto-based songwriter and bandleader Tamara Lindeman, The Weather Station released their seventh album, Humanhood – a record written against a backdrop of Lindeman’s own inner struggles and an outer world in so much turmoil – in January. A series of intimate in-store performances in the UK then followed before the band crossed over into mainland Europe. They are now back in this country and Leeds is the second date in a run of seven shows that will end on Thursday in London at the Islington Assembly Hall.
Tamara Lindeman is in good spirits. Having just arrived back on mainland Britain early this morning after sailing here from Dublin, and in making a very thinly veiled parallel with the current tensions, tariffs, and turbulence prevalent in North America, she is happy to be in a country “where life is life.” And having once again sampled the venue’s exquisite pies, she is clearly delighted to be back in the Brudenell.
Five songs into this evening’s performance, she explains that the set is divided into three distinct parts. The first, which had just ended had stretched from the appropriately named ‘Descent’ – the instrumental opening track from Humanhood – to ‘Robber’, which had disappeared into a vortex of suitably demented saxophone from the brilliant Karen Ng, reflected a state of chaos and disorder. A glorious evocation of the abstract, jazz-tinged avant-garde – think here of Joni Mitchell around the time of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter – for all of its inherent heaviness, the music also possessed a strange vibrancy.
Tamara Lindeman went on to describe “a disconnect from the things that really matter to us” before the song ‘Loss’ – like ‘Robber’ before it, drawn from The Weather Station’s fifth studio album, 2021’s Ignorance – leads into the second phase of the evening, “a tricky part”, she tells us, during which we as individuals can just become overwhelmed. You strongly suspect Lindeman is talking here about the difficulties she has experienced with her own mental health and the continuing destruction of the natural world. The ensuing series of songs with their warped chords, fluctuating rhythms, and sonic vulnerabilities certainly reflect a deep emotional struggle.
The Weather Station move into the concluding part of this trilogy, that of connection. A reworking of ‘Fleuve’ – a short instrumental on the new album – becomes an extended adventure in neo-classicism as Ben Boye’s twinkling piano runs haemorrhage into Karen Ng’s delicate flute flurries. This relative tranquillity is suddenly punctured by the thunderous arrival of Humanhood’s imperious title track. It signals a moment of realisation, a feeling that is reinforced by first the unbridled optimism of ‘Tried to Tell You’ and then, finally, by a euphoric ‘Parking Lot’ during which The Weather Station sound begins to blur most comfortably into mid-period Fleetwood Mac.
The Weather Station dispense with the formality of leaving the stage and just move seamlessly into their encore, Tamara Lindeman’s favourite track from Humanhood, ‘The Sewing.’ As its title suggests, the song aims to stitch everything together – here it is expectation, reality, and desire – and by so doing The Weather Station leave us with a strong feeling of hope for the future in what are otherwise very troubling times.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos of The Weather Station at Brudenell Social Club
