Spectreview: The Weather Station – Ignorance

Released: February 5, 2020

Singer-Songwriter
(Indie Rock)
(Folk)

-FUCHSIA PINK-

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“I don’t have the heart to conceal my love
When I know it is the best of me
If I should offend you, I will show myself out
You can bury me in doubt if you need to”

After the requisite multiple listens, I think this record is fantastic. It’s dense, it’s thoughtfully laid out, the instrumental performances are tight, the production is gorgeous, and Tamara Lindeman’s poetry sprawls over everything like a down quilt over a cabin bed. It’s objectively a wonderful record, but that wonder comes with an asterisk.

Conceptualizing art (especially music) around something like climate change is a losing proposition. It’s not that it shouldn’t ever be done, because anything that can grab the rest of us by the cheeks and wake them up is sorely needed. But the reality is that it’s 2021 and summers are wiping out hundreds and winters are freezing out unfreezeable places and the goalposts for tolerable air quality have to keep being moved, and most importantly the overwhelming majority of people who are truly care about diving into a band like The Weather Station, or the people who are willing to listen to people like me recommend bands like The Weather Station, already know why.

There’s a heavy, almost unbearable fatalism running through this kind of music simply by the nature of its existence. Canadian art pop, specifically that as dense as Ignorance, intrinsically sounds like luxury. That luxury runs the risk of being lost forever to circumstances that would deprive many of us from the myriad entertainments we readily consume today, not to mention the equally luxuriant attention they demand. I could be off base, but I can’t conceive of a way to write music about climate change without highlighting its inevitable worthlessness. If you’re trapped in a burning museum, would you stop to appreciate the art?

I digress. Ignorance is breathtaking because of its fatalism, because of its challenging nature. Throughout, Lindeman aims to examine the callouses and coping mechanisms we’ve developed in response to the “ahuman” mechanics part and parcel with living in modernity. To her, the album title is less a damning proclamation than an exercise in empathy, a dare to connect to the benefit of her doubt. In a world steadily subsumed by divisions and echo chambers, “Separated” argues we continue that conflict on purpose, the work of healing harder than the ease of lashing out. In that same world, both the headlines looming over “Atlantic” and the inconvenient truths of “Loss” get shunted to the side because the pain of avoidance ekes out the pain of confronting the inevitable.

The answers to her queries, in summary? Human behaviors, and nothing more complex than that. In that very simple way her songs approach profundity, taking into account how low that bar has fallen. Rarely Lindeman undercuts her argument with floreted idealism – aren’t the desires we ought not to repress on “Tried To Tell You” kind of responsible for our downfall? And how to address the ubiquity of the “robber” without wading into insolvable, identity-based waters? – but albums aren’t fucking dissertations. Humanity is ugly and dangerous, capable of very real damage. Ignorance states that it’s equally damaging to shut yourself off from that network, while also acknowledging that it’s undeniably human to do so.

It does this with music that feels as rich as the vistas the worst among us are deadset on eliminating. Though the record is seemingly front-loaded, it’s only because its first two songs are so magnificently constructed that a peak inevitably forms, even considering the consistent highs of what follows. “Robber” is truly as good as The Weather Station has ever been, floating on a mysterious mood and buttressed by punctuative piano, soaring strings and the deep cuts of a rogue saxophone. Its format – that of a flower unfurling in the morning sun – foretells what’s to come. The breezy push of “Atlantic”; the soaring “Parking Lot”; the weighty, dirgeful “Trust”; most of the tracks on Ignorance build to a climax but refuse resolution, fittingly for a record filled with unanswerable questions.

Singer-songwriters dream of their arrangements coming to life so gorgeously. Over a dozen musicians assisted Lindeman in creating the living, lush soundscapes that surround her musings. Horns and guitar flicker across the speakers in “Atlantic,” playing the part of wondrous, doomed nature. The staccato chords opening “Loss” are the “sun streams in the blinds”; the gentle progression of “Subdivisions” paints the blankets of snow covering the scene. Over a decade into the project, Lindeman has become a master in illustrative songwriting, able to match the thematic qualities of her poetry with equally evocative compositions.

The final piece of the puzzle is her voice itself, though it’s not so much its remarkable tambour as it is the delivery. I’ve used poetry multiple times to describe her lyrics here, but that’s what they are. To come up with such a vocal line to lay over the verse of “Subdivisions” requires a certain degree of imagination and confidence; ditto for her performance of “Tried To Tell You,” which poignantly weaves into the background. The comparisons to Joni Mitchell might be a little on-the-nose considering the extramusical similarities, but it’s really hard not to hear Mitchell’s lilting, observant notes over these songs.

If she were still working, how would Mitchell attempt what Lindeman does here? Writing about the end of modernity is becoming, and will continue to become, more and more commonplace as that unplaced finale approaches. Some will believe it’s needed. Others will believe it’s simply to cope.

The value of a record like Ignorance is, in the most basic term, one classic effect of good art: a confirmation of humanity. However you choose to approach a great collective loss – whether you chase your desires or repress them, whether you revel in the present or prepare for its deletion – is your choice, neither correct or incorrect but still representative of an enduring soul. Would that the realization could prompt an exhale of relief, rather than that familiar pit in the floor of the gut?

Highly recommended for everything soft and green.