
The Weather Station
Humanhood
Fat Possum
Ignorance was bliss, a sumptuous sound and melody gallery of baroque-folk experimentation, thoughtfully prepared by The Weather Station and its poetic mystic Tamara Lindeman. Inventive and well-plotted, artfully arranged and organically fertile, the sensuous 2021 album was a critical triumph and an eloquent expression of climate change fear and loathing.
As an encore, its successor, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at The Stars, was just as lovely, if more impulsive and free-spirited. And it deftly added jazz to the palette. The ambitiously titled Humanhood, The Weather Station’s newest theater of imagination, blends the urge to create swirling, quirky chaos and curious fantasy with lush and lucid pop articulation — see the briskly paced “Window,” the fully realized “Ribbon,” and the title track’s beautifully broken, avant-garde sculpture and demolition derby for confirmation — all while painting rich frescoes of existential bewilderment and agony. It’s the perfect soundtrack for the dizzying misinformation age Humanhood confronts. Mistrust is in the air.
Moments of self-doubt and confusion, uncertainty, and alienation as well as regret and redemption permeate the unmoored Humanhood, the weird younger sister of Suzanne Vega’s electronic, urban-folk abstraction 99.9F° and Sarah McLachlan’s soft, undulating maturity and longing. It bathes in luxurious yet often fragile piano, with strings and saxophone, flute, and woodwind instruments fluttering and gently stirring the atmosphere, propulsive rhythms driving its strong currents, and digital elements agitating any sense of calm. That’s true of a soulful, dissonant, whirling “Body Moves,” as well as the creation of a cinematic backdrop for “Irreversible Damage,” and the soul-baring, anxiety-riddled phone call that cycles through its range of emotions.
Glitchy beats introduce the rolling “Neon Signs,” which moves swiftly and expands, whereas the deliberate and delicate “Lonely” gets uncomfortably close, and interludes like the static-covered “Passage” and “Aurora” and “Descent” – with their dissonant bleeds and hum – act like bridges to places like “Sewing,” the intimate, introspective closer that tries to stitch up old wounds. Let’s get Humanhood into surgery. The situation is critical.