The Weather Station - Humanhood
Fat Possum Records
Released on January 17th, 2025
Tamara Lindeman is no stranger to the existential anxieties that permeate daily 21st century life. The Toronto-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist has been releasing her own take on indie-bent folk for over a decade with her project the Weather Station, but in 2021 the project took a decidedly different twist in the course. With her monumental album Ignorance, Lindeman acquired a new clutch of musicians, expanding into new territory with the addition of woodwinds, strings, saxophone, and a second drummer, and she brought this broader sonic palette to bear on songs that shot her folkier roots into space. The pivot was a beautiful surprise, and resulted in an album that was as breathtaking as it was aesthetically adventurous.
Following in this new trajectory, Lindeman has brought on even more collaborators for her latest effort, Humanhood. The songs were built out of two sessions at the Canterbury Music Company in Toronto, and, shockingly, these sessions were entirely improvised. I say shockingly because the songs on this record are incredibly cohesive, tight, and fully developed, the production and arrangement by far the most sophisticated of the Weather Station’s entire catalog. There were extensive overdubs added (with familiar names like Joseph Shabason making contributions) and the production was masterfully executed, but the songs still have that joyous chaos and vitality that only the best improvisation can transmit.
Lindeman’s voice is the anchor, the guiding light throughout the voyage, and her vocals are as gorgeous and powerful (“Mirror,” “Humanhood”) as they are intimately heartbreaking (“Ribbon,” “Lonely”). The album relishes in the extremes, diving between moments of sparse, cosmic brushstrokes and resplendent cacophony, often in the course of the same song. Songs flow and tumble into one another, a firm thread of Lindeman’s unwavering artistic vision connecting the disparate voices into a choir, a celebration of sound and grace.
Tracks like “Humanhood,” with its mammoth layers of percussion and surprise appearance of banjo, and “Irreversible Damage” with its spoken word passages and synth-corruscated rivers, barely manage to contain all these multitudes; the songs strain at the edges, always at the brink of overspilling with raw energy, unbridled musicianship. The energy present here is overwhelming, itself perhaps a commentary on the pure force of human spirit in the face of these existential threats. Whatever may come, monuments to our better nature like Humanhood will always be essential, will always be necessary. Now, more than ever.
- Harman Burns