Humanhood by the Weather Station
Even as Tamara Lindeman has gently moved the Weather Station from the Americana of early albums like 2011’s All of It Was Mine to the jazz-informed modulation of 2021’s Ignorance, she has contained the movement within her pensiveness. She sings with a kind of exuberant introversion.
Both the exuberance and introversion are necessary on the seventh Weather Station album, Humanhood, because here Lindeman explores the innermost workings of her mental and emotional self while she invites her current band lineup to take a deeper part in the musical process.
With a configuration that includes players from Ignorance and its 2022 companion, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, and relatively new personnel like keyboardist Ben Boye, Lindeman encourages not only elaboration but also, on two tracks, the curtain-raising “Descent” and the later “Aurora,” outright improvisation.
Adeptly supported, Lindeman admits her troubles through lyrics like “Why I can’t get off this floor?” in “Neon Signs,” the rhythm cautiously intensifying as she describes her desire for connection and her suspicion of everything she sees as she walks down a city street. Karen Ng’s flute provides flutteringly plaintive companionship to Lindeman’s ache.
Guest musicians overdub their parts subtly onto the Weather Station’s work. Experimental guitarist James Elkington embroiders the piano-driven reflections of “Ribbon,” and Sam Amidon recalls the band’s roots with banjo notes sprinkling into the uneasy waters of the title song.
Amidon is the husband of singer-songwriter Beth Orton, and that feels curiously right, because Humanhood resembles Orton’s stellar 2022 LP Weather Alive. The albums share a sense of musical cohesiveness as a warm bulwark against internal wintriness, and Orton and Lindeman share tendencies to lean back from louder vocal proclamations.
Lindeman’s lean back somehow encourages the listener to lean forward attentively, and she rewards that attention richly. Humanhood is pensiveness as passion.
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