Uncut Magazine’s year-end issue is now out in the world, featuring a trio of PoB artists that they have graciously included on their list of the 75 best albums of 2017: Jake Xerxes Fussell (#44), Michael Chapman (#29), and The Weather Station (#4), the latter of which also gets an in-depth six-page feature by Jason Anderson entitled “The Quiet Storm.” Many thanks to Uncut for the kind words.
The London-based band (with Cornish roots) brings a windswept energy and daylight to a contemplative, gorgeously rendered suite of songs about inhabiting the landscape, and our bodies, in joy and pain alike. This is the band’s most ambitious and emotionally affecting work to date: atmospheric but deeply rooted, equally concerned with investigating the concrete and the cosmic, both quiet details of the everyday and looming matters of faith.
A few weeks back, The Weather Station played an intimate live performance, with strings, on CBC Radio’s q. Now, the video evidence has surfaced! Feast your eyes and ears on these versions of the three singles from her self-titled album.
The acclaimed new album by Gun Outfit, their most brutally beautiful statement yet, is now available where’er you may range, above or below the earth. Out of Range contains the band’s most conceptually sophisticated and lyrically ambitious material, while remaining their most musically subtle, understated, and accessible album to date, completing their gradual metamorphosis from punk aesthetics to a truly cosmic country—wherein “country” is a geography, a structure of feeling, not a genre. What other record begins with Orpheus and ends with Samuel Beckett?
Watch the new video, shot at the Ontario Fall Fair and featuring musician Ian Daniel Kehoe, as premiered by Noisey, who write of the song: “Over atmospheric guitars and gorgeous strings that Lindeman self-arranged, its startlingly stunning arrangement matches the lyrical heft.” Fresh from a sold-out show in London, the band is also announcing a string of new UK tour dates in early 2018.
Gun Outfit have shared the third single, “Sally Rose,” from their forthcoming album, Out of Range, along with another self-directed video from the band premiering via Noisey—featuring shots of Carrie Keith in the desert, a reference to First Nations songwriter Willie Dunn, fireworks, rock climbing, horse racing and more—and an interview about the American Southwest and the Meat Puppets. Gun Outfit tours the EU this winter.
It’s been a busy few weeks for The Weather Station—here is a brief rundown of some of the goings-on, including live sessions for Stereogum, Paste, and the CBC, upcoming EU and North American tour dates, and recent press acclaim.
The Weather Station is out today, finally fully with us in the world, and now more than ever, we need these songs of emotional and psychological complexity and interrogative clarity amid ambiguities. Take a listen and a look, buy a copy, and (re)discover the power of Tamara Lindeman’s singular songwriting, which is being compared to the short stories of Raymond Carver, or akin to “Sam Shepard writing haiku.”
Hear the whole record before its Oct. 6 release. “I’ve been a fan for a while now and always quite enjoyed her albums, but this one is on another level. These songs sit in a place between thought and expression, where the music flows confidently from heart to tongue. It’s filled with feminist politics, kindred spirits, conversations and heartbreak, all well played as inspired gems. She’s lived these words. They are her being. They are her stories.” – Bob Boilen
Gold Flake Paint premieres a gorgeous, stately counterpoint to the rush of her first two singles from her self-titled album due on Oct. 6th. Read the lyrics, and also check out the 9/10 lead review in Uncut, in which Richard Williams argues that “no one else is writing true-life songs with such a command of nuance and ellipsis, with such generosity of unguarded emotion and careful economy of means, like Sam Shepard writing haiku.”
