NEW ALBUMS

The challenge of loving a world on fire: Tamara Lindeman’s climate grief masterpiece is a new kind of protest record. By John Mulvey. Illustration by Corey Brickley.

Outlook stormy at The Weather Station, Mogwai and many more.

The Weather Station

Ignorance

FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP/MC

THERE ARE NOW, perhaps unsurprisingly, academics who study the emotional rather than the physical impact of climate change. One is Panu Pihkala, a specialist in eco-anxiety at the University of Helsinki. In a BBC online piece from last April, Pihkala wrote about using the work of grief researchers who’d investigated the impact of bereavement. “[William] Worden defined that one of the key tasks in the grief process is ‘the adjustment to a new environment’,” Pihkala observed. “Something has profoundly changed, something or someone is either lost or in the process of going away, and grief can help us to adjust… These definitions match the needed scale of climate grief.”

On first listen, much of the fifth album by Tamara Lindeman, an exceptional Canadian singer-songwriter who performs as The Weather Station, appears to be about the end of an affair. One song, Trust, specifically mentions a divorce, and “court proceedings”. But then Lindeman asks for the evidence to be presented: “The baskets of wild roses, the crumpled petals and misshapen heads of reeds and rushes/The bodies of the common birds, robins, crows, and thrushes.” Ignorance is about many things, but again and again it uses elaborate metaphors of a dysfunctional relationship, of the loss of a loved one, to articulate Lindeman’s own personal climate grief. To mourn the imminent passing of, as she puts it in Trust, “Everything that I have loved and all the light touches.”

An environmental break-up album is an original but challenging concept, but it’s in safe, skilled hands with Lindeman. For just over a decade, she has been releasing literate and finely-wrought folk albums as The Weather Station; albums that have often – thanks to her poetic candour, her understated, deceptively offhand way with a melody, and of course her nationality – brought comparisons with Joni Mitchell. As with Mitchell, though, folk music could only contain her talent for so long. If 2015’s

Loyalty and 2017’s The Weather Station found Lindeman carefully expanding the parameters of her sound, Ignorance, recorded swiftly in the spring and early summer of 2019, blows it wide open.

The album begins with Robber, and a sense of four distinct musical ideas happening at once. There is a rhythm section holding down a clipped, linear groove. A second tranche of musicians freestyling on saxophone, percussion, flecked electric guitar, abrupt piano chords of the kind Mark Hollis would once leave hanging in dead air. The lowering accents of a string section provide an atmosphere akin to that of Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy. And then, hovering above it all, Lindeman’s voice, outlining how our world has been stolen from us by an elite business class whose criminality goes mostly undetected. The plan, (as Lindeman explains on page 82), is to draw on “order and chaos”, but there’s a lot of space and room to manoeuvre in the mix, too. The Weather Station have never been this accessible before, or this experimental. The combination is urgent, and gripping, as the subject matter demands.

This, it soon transpires, is the model for much of

Ignorance. As a folk singer who always previously composed on guitar, Lindeman’s vocal melodies tended to direct the ebb and flow of the music. But on these 10 songs, she often seems thrillingly unanchored, buffeted by the tangents of the improvising players, carried along by the persistent “organic disco” rhythms. She has long written with precision about uncertainty, describing in a very measured way emotions in transition. Here, though, there is often a necessary air of panic.

“My God, my God, what a sunset,” she exclaims at the start of Atlantic, as she recalls lying in a field, a little drunk, watching shearwaters fly overhead. The music is frantic and gorgeous, a sensory overload to match the sunset, but her anxiety permeates even these ecstatic moments. How, she implies, do we recalibrate our aesthetic responses to beauty when that beauty is being existentially threatened? “I should get all this dying off my mind,” she admits. “I should really know better than to read the headlines.”

It isn’t, of course, quite that easy. On Parking Lot – svelte, pacey adult pop; a little Christine McVie, perhaps – she becomes preoccupied with a bird flying above the venue where she’s about to play a show. Again, the spectacle of the present makes the future unbearable. Grief paralyses. “Is it all right if I don’t wanna sing tonight?” she sings. “I know you are tired of seeing tears in my eyes.”

Ignorance is hardly the first record to find attractive musical ways to articulate sadness, but Lindeman’s triumph is more sophisticated than a simple contrast. The ravishing music is studded with jazz details – the impressionistic gusts of saxophone and flute; Lindeman’s own clangorous guitar overdubs – that add a neurotic edge to the proceedings. The words, meanwhile, luxuriate in the prettiness of our world, the better to emphasise what we’re in the process of losing. It’s a mix that embraces complexity and eschews the normal vocabulary of protest, but finds a new and highly personalised one that’s every bit as potent.

These are difficult subjects, but Lindeman is gifted enough to express them with a clarity of nuance. Heart, like Trust, is another song where love could either be for a person or for an entire ecosystem; what matters is her need to assert that love’s validity. “Don’t ask me for indifference, don’t come to me for distance,” she sings, and this is what Ignorance delivers: the document of an introvert empowered by the vastest crisis of passion imaginable.

“The music is frantic and gorgeous, a sensory overload.”