We’ve long admired the transcendent songs of The Weather Station, so it’s with great pleasure and excitement that we announce the May 12 release of their beautiful new record Loyalty.
The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded at La Frette Studios in France with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. A diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station contribute to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier’s Occasional Rain. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments. “Your trouble is like a lens,” Lindeman discerns in “I Mined,” “through which the whole world bends.” It’s powerful stuff.
Pre-Order the LP ($18), CD ($13), or both ($25) from PoB
$9.00 – $30.00
This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pagePre-Order the Digital Album via iTunes ($9.99)
Pre-Order the Digital Album via Amazon ($9.49)
Pre-Order the digital album ($9), LP, or CD via Bandcamp
The deluxe LP, pressed on 150g virgin vinyl, features a heavy-duty matte jacket, full-color inner sleeve, lyrics, and a download coupon; the CD is housed in a gatefold jacket. Pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of the first single, “Way It Is, Way It Could Be,” which you can listen to here thanks to the good people at Stereogum (Canadians may have heard it on Q on CBC Radio.) We anticipate shipping pre-orders at least a week in advance of the May 12 release date.
All pre-order customers who place orders by April 26 will be entered into a drawing for a Loyalty test pressing and a PoB t-shirt (available soon in all-new colors.)
Loyalty is imbued with the crisp intimacy of the coldest season, the allure of the city of lights. Lindeman’s voice floats by in the higher registers of head voice, never breathy but, instead, misty and amorphous. Lindeman’s songwriting catches your attention and holds it. She’s clever without any smugness, rendering every day events into existential pictures of uncertainty, poking and prodding at subconscious desires without ever fully exposing them.
– Caitlin White, Stereogum
*Please note that this album will be available via Outside Music in Canada, and from PoB everywhere else.
Photo by Jonathan Ratovoarisoa