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Posts tagged ‘Tamara Lindeman’

Mar 14

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A change in the weather

It took a while for me to get from admiration to love for the Weather Station’s new album, Humanhood. At Islington Assembly Hall last night, Tamara Lindeman and her four musicians — Ben Boye (keyboards), Karen Ng (alto saxophone, flute, keyboards), Ben Whiteley (bass guitar) and Dom Billett (drums) — brought its songs fully to focus, in combination with several from its great 2021 predecessor, Ignorance.

This was, as Lindeman had promised, a show designed for theatres, with subtle lighting and a set consisting of three tall, pale, rough-hewn standing stones on which were projected fragments of elemental images: flickers of light from stars and fires, avalanches, drowning forests, all counterpointing the cool but never disengaged clarity of the songs.

The musicianship was exemplary. Whiteley anchored the sometimes irresistible grooves, Billett graded his volume with great care, Ng added the occasional free-jazz flurries on alto that bring the music into a different atmosphere, Boye provided synth mood-setters and lovely spare unaccompanied piano passages, Lindeman contributed economical electric lead guitar.

Together they established moods that were sustained and allowed to evolve through clusters of half a dozen songs at a time, the dynamic ranging from reflecting near-silence on “Lonely” and “Sewing” to that gentle but irresistible gallop in which Lindeman specialises on songs such as Humanhood‘s title track and “Neon Signs” and Ignorance‘s “Loss” and the sublime “Parking Lot”.

Her lyrics are extraordinary: non-repeating snatches of thought and conversation that somehow came through more clearly in live performance, along with her concern for a threat to the environment renewed by the events of the last few months. After starting out as an acoustic singer-songwriter, she has now, with her musicians’ help, developed a carefully textured, agile and quietly resilient hybrid genre that is the ideal setting for her words.

On the last night of a European tour, this was pretty much a perfect concert, one likely to live long in the memory of a warmly appreciative audience.

* The Weather Station’s Humanhood is on the Fat Possum label.

Mar 15

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The Weather Station live from Toronto

A year to the day since I was last able to see musicians performing in person, the Weather Station’s livestreamed concert from Toronto on Thursday provided a reminder of what’s been missing. Tamara Lindeman and her musicians were performing the 10 songs from her new album, Ignorance, shuffled in order but retaining the enigmatic allure that I wrote about in the March issue of Uncut.

I won’t repeat what I said in that review, except to note that the arrival of Marcus Paquin as Lindeman’s co-producer has brought a new perspective to her songs, which are now driven less — not at all, in fact — by strummed or finger-picked acoustic guitars and more by drums and bass, and decorated by subtle use of keyboards, electronics and wind instruments (and, on the album, a string trio). The new songs confront loss, both intimate and global: the departure of a lover, the disappearance of a species. These concerns, with their very different time-scales, are like messages lightly inscribed on two transparent sheets. They slide over each other, clarifying or converging, a pair of palimpsests coming in and out of focus over the band’s momentum.

It was a treat to be able to watch her and the band tackling this fascinating material. The live performance — in Toronto’s Revolution Recording Studios — turned out to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences between the songs, making the whole thing feel satisfyingly coherent. I was particularly struck by the restless swells of “Loss”, Christine Bourgie’s fine guitar solo on “Subdivisions”, the spellbound poise of “Trust”, the galloping rhythm of “Heart”, and the closing free-ish jam between Brodie West’s alto saxophone and Lindeman’s piano on “Robber”, where Ben Whiteley’s bass guitar and Kieran Adams’s drums conjured something like an alt-rock version of one of Norman Whitfield’s Temptations epics. (Here’s the album version of “Robbery”, in case you haven’t heard it.) The other musicians were Johnny Spence (piano), Will Kidman (guitar, keyboards), Ryan Driver (flute), Philippe Melanson and Evan Cartwright (percussion) and Felicity Williams, whose voice shadowed Lindman’s to particularly good effect on “Heart”.

Perfect sound (by Brenndan McGuire) and a restrained approach to lighting (Louise Simpson) and camerawork (Lulu Wei) ensured that the qualities which make the Weather Station so special were allowed to speak. In a little prologue, a just-recognisable Lindeman lay on a pebble beach under a sheet, reading a book, while a dancer wheeled and turned in the distance. We were taken back to that setting at half-time, just where you’d be turning over a vinyl album, and again at the very end, for Lindeman to read short verses by the American poet Ed Roberson. Nicely done, but the real pleasure was in witnessing her own poetry brought to life by musicians, with masks but no headphones or baffles, playing together in real time, so beautifully.

Oct 24

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The Weather Station in Islington

The Weather Station in IslingtonA few hours ahead of her gig with her band, the Weather Station, at the Lexington pub in Islington last night, the Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman tweeted a photograph she’d taken during a walk along the nearby Regent’s Canal. “Sandy Denny in headphones,” she added. Sandy would have been pleased by the compliment and intrigued by her admirer’s performance, and in particular by the way Lindeman managed to make the 50-year-old concept of folk-rock sound brand new.

The Weather Station’s new self-titled album embraces electric guitars in a characteristically modest and subtle way. Lindeman took the stage at a sold-out Lexington with the lead guitarist (and occasional organist) Will Kidman, the bass guitarist Ben Whiteley, and the drummer Erik Heestermans, and made the relatively new approach sound like the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps the key was her rhythm guitar playing, the core of the sound, the central strum and the enunciator of chord patterns that move between the comfortingly familiar and the ear-teasingly sophisticated, unpushy but generating real momentum behind melodies that are liable to soar at unexpected moments. The other instruments arranged themselves around her with discreet sensitivity, leaving plenty of space for us to appreciate the care with which she modulates her tone and enunciates her extraordinary lines.

There were lots of songs from her last two albums, among them “Way It Is, Way It Could Be”, “I Mined”, “Floodplain”, “Tapes”, “I Could Only Stand By” and “Impossible” (with organ drone and galloping tom-toms) from Loyalty and “Free”, “Thirty”, “Kept It All to Myself”, “Black Flies” and “You and I (On the Other Side of the World)” from the new one. A short central solo acoustic segment expanded to a duo when she was joined for one song by Will Stratton, the American singer-songwriter who had provided a pleasant support set.

What was interesting about seeing her live was the way her lyrics were given, if anything, even greater value. Some of these songs are like the deepest conversations you ever had with someone you care about — and very often they’re like things that were formulated but somehow never got said. On the faster songs she piles lines on top of each other to create a river of thought and feeling. And none of the nuances are lost when she sings them with a band in front of an audience.

Lindeman doesn’t do stage dramatics or ingratiation. When a song ends (and her endings, whether abrupt or lingering, are always worth attention), she tends to make no acknowledgment of applause but goes straight into adjusting her tuning for the next song. Yet there’s no distance between her and her listeners. Although her spoken comments tend to be restricted to dry asides, she radiates a warm intelligence; her fleeting changes of expression — a grimace at a fluffed entrance, a small and mysterious smile now and then — say most of what she needs to convey. By the end of the evening I don’t suppose there was a man or a woman in the place who wasn’t a bit in love with her.

* The Weather Station play tonight (October 24) in the Eagle Inn, Salford and tomorrow at the Music’s Not Dead record shop in Bexhill on Sea (free, 7pm). They’ll be back for another UK tour in January and February. The new album is on the Paradise of Bachelors label.