Tamara Lindeman, AKA: The Weather Station, the musical project of Toronto artist has announced her new album Loyalty. This is The Weather Station’s first release on Paradise of Bachelors. The LP was Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris, collaborating with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist).

After releases on You’ve Changed Records, Loyalty brings a freshly unflinching self-examining gaze and emotional and musical control to Lindeman’s songs. Sonically, the record is a quietly radical statement, with certain passages achieving an eerie harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station. on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibes. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts and involutes the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during even our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments.

Outside her musical practice, Lindeman also happens to be an accomplished film and television actor, and it’s her directorial eye for quietly compelling characters and the rich details of the everyday, Bressonian in its specificity and scope, that drives the limpid singularity of The Weather Station’s songs. As in Bresson’s films, there is no trace of theater here, no brittle singer-songwriter histrionics, but rather a powerful performative focus and narrative restraint. Despite the descriptive delicacy, the album never lapses into preciousness or sentimentality, instead retaining its barbs and bristles and remaining resolutely clear-eyed and thick-skinned.

The Weather Station
Loyalty
Paradise of Bachelors (US)
May 12, 2015

A1. Way It Is, Way It Could Be
A2. Loyalty
A3. Floodplain
A4. Shy Women
A5. Personal Eclipse
A6. Life’s Work

B1. Like Sisters
B2. I Mined
B3. Tapes
B4. I Could Only Stand By
B5. At Full Height