Album Review: Loyalty by The Weather Station

When creating music as sparse as that found on Loyalty, in order to retain the listener’s attention one must either have exceptional melodies or compelling lyrics. Clearly aware of this, the Weather Station offers both. A clear highlight and one of the better songs to have come out this year, the title track features a linear narrative about love and loss and moving on, delivered in a way that makes these staid lyrical tropes feel fresh and new.

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Loyalty is the album we've been waiting for from the Weather Station. Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman, the woman behind the project, has moved away from the introverted experimental banjo songs of her earliest recordings, like her 2009 debut The Line, and the folkier arrangements of 2011's lovely All Of It Was Mine, to embrace electric guitars, various vintage keyboard instruments (piano, Hammond, Wurlitzer, Rhodes), vibraphone and drums. In fact, Loyalty — recorded last February in La Frette-sur-Seine in France with Bahamas' Afie Jurvanen and engineer Robbie Lackritz (Bahamas, Feist) — flirts with pop and jazz forms, bursting into spurts of levity and flurried movement amidst still, reflective periods.

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Tamara Lindeman is no longer singing about white lilacs, wild columbine, rhubarb pie and big jars of honey. On two previous albums as the Weather Station, Lindeman used acoustic guitars, banjos and a lexicon of bucolic imagery to write graceful, generous folk songs. The material wasn’t simple so much as vernacular, so that even the Toronto songwriter’s most intense reflections on love and lust espoused a downhome familiarity.

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The Weather Station — Loyalty (Paradise of Bachelors)The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman has something in common with Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato and a few other high profile divas in that she was a teenage TV actor, the transition from which is notoriously difficult for anyone who wants to do anything real. However, you could listen to Loyalty from one end to another and not find a hint of artifice. Ms.

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Have you ever heard of Joni Mitchell? Of course, you know all ‘aboot’ her, but do you know as much about fellow-Canadian, Tamara Lindeman’s project The Weather Station? Vocal comparisons to Mitchell are spontaneously and incorrigibly conjured by Lindeman’s voice. The new record Loyalty explores family, perceptions of the self and is awash with language inspired by the landscape. The large cold bit above America is remarkable for its prodigious musical output, with Leonard Cohen cited as a particular influence on this band.

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