It’s been four years since Tamara Lindeman enthralled us with her mature odyssey of songwriting ‘Ignorance’. The next year, an album of songs recorded during those same sessions arrived, not quite capturing the same magic as its predecessor. In the world of The Weather Station, balance is everything while also being very fragile indeed. 

On ‘Humanhood’, Lindeman and the rest of the band which now includes Ben Boye and Karen Ng, treat us to maximalism, or at least their version of it. There is still the same tender heartbreak to be found here, a feeling that speaks to a shared experience of ‘humanhood’ as we all understand it. However, this album is buoyed by some of the most extravagant and raucous instrumentation in the band’s history.

Artists like Sigur Rós have often been lauded for their ability to translate the essence of nature and a landscape into musical compositions, and there seems to be a similar synergy at play on ‘Humanhood’. It may be the association with the cover art or simply the time of year that the album is released, but there is something so vivid and rich about how the music on ‘Humanhood’ generates feelings of desolation, harsh winds that whistle through the jagged edges of mountains, and inhospitable locations, the kind you find in nature documentaries that perceive the large vistas of the world’s most robust and arid places. Quite how a combination of instruments can illicit such a response in a listener is something that you simply can’t explain, but the effect is potent and ever-present throughout the record.

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Describing her disconnection from friends, family, lovers, and strangers alike, Lindeman couples these harsh soundscapes and despairing lyrics with an always-ethereal but never cold or heartless series of vocal performances. Like a beacon of light in the darkness, her unique intonations and ubiquitous warmth is something that continues to provide a through line to the band’s work, a heartbeat that refuses to be suppressed by anything shift in tone.

This all results in a full-bodied sound that is reminiscent of ‘Ignorance’ and, at points, exists in the shadow of it. This isn’t to say that ‘Humanhood’ is anything less than excellent. It merely points to the peaks that The Weather Station has climbed to before. Digested on its own, though, ‘Humanhood’ delivers a cathartic surge of pathos straight to your heart. Whether it be Lindeman’s words, the choppy snares that punctuate her turns of phrase so brilliantly on songs like title track ‘Humanhood’ and closer ‘Sewing’, or the fluttering swells that are lent to compositions such as ‘Ribbon’ by Ng’s saxophone and clarinet, you’re never short for something substantive and immersive to hold onto. 

An album of rare unity by a band that is quickly making such cohesion its trademark, ‘Humanhood’ is the most full-throated creation from The Weather Station to date. The relief is that they still have something really worth saying, which makes the album an early yardstick for all the releases to follow across the rest of the year.

9/10

Words: Michael Watkins

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