The Weather Station - Ignorance

February 5, 2021 - Fat Possum Records

Ignorance is the fifth album from Canadian folk band The Weather Station, a thought-provoking existential journey that articulates with painful directness what it’s like to be alive right now and also to be self-aware. Lead singer and songwriter Tara Lindeman is a master communicator and lyricist, and we’re hooked as she muses with a sort of morbid curiosity about the inner workings of the human mind in the modern condition. Her poetry is playful, but she doesn’t sugar coat or obscure its meaning. Her songs are telling us something that’s important for us to understand. Ours is a world of imminent climate disaster, of the abstract shapes of late stage capitalism, of society asking you to fight your nature in order to succeed in it, and of parents who are still asking you regularly when they can expect grandkids. Lindeman asks, what does liberty look like in this present state? To borrow her analogy from the track ‘Wear,’ how do you take the garment of the world off your body in order to be yourself? What are you supposed to do when you just don’t fit right into the fold? And how do you explain this to people who, for lack of a more sophisticated way to phrase this, just don’t get it?

Musically, the sound that The Weather Station has cultivated on Ignorance is what I would call “mature angst” that’s impossible to look away from once you get started. It’s like staring at a solar eclipse. Beautifully brooding. The first track ‘Robber’ is a wind-up device, built to twist us into attention and action like toys complicit in an act they have no choice but to perform. The album thus ambles purposefully into existence, with intermittent strings on the upbeat, soft piano underneath but moments of saxophone, tense piano, an ominous verse with an almost monotone melody. Throughout, textural, subtle undercurrents sweep us away into the tragedy of taking a bite from the tree of knowledge. This music is certainly rooted folk rock, with relatively friendly guitar chords, ballad-like song structures, a bit of grit, and a free flowing groove that you could easily overhear on a Friday night in a local underground bar. But like work of The National, the overall effect it has is agonizing once you get hit in the head with the bitterness of Lindeman’s words. Agonizing, but ironically soothing at the same time. When you feel like a misfit, it’s nice to know that other people feel that way too. And Lindeman, in her breathy resonant voice that pushes sound out from loose lips, is making the argument that we all feel that way as we become further and further separated from an authentic life to keep the wheels of the great machines spinning. 

Like adopting a pet, committing to listen to Ignorance is a commitment to heartbreak. It will ask you some tough questions as you hum along in a sort of glittery haze, hypnotized by the familiar format and compositional conventions of the indie folk genre. In ‘Atlantic,’ this contemplative questioning comes as a literal grapple with the day-to-day knowledge that your day-to-day existence is contributing to the death of what you love about the planet Earth. How do you live with love while carrying that around? And after reminding you overtly that you are on a runaway train with no control over speed or destination, Lindeman points out in ‘Loss’ that “at some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” There is a reclamation of control, a self sovereignty, in nihilism, even if it’s just a small perspective shift. If nothing you do matters, then you can do anything. You can be authentic again, you don’t have to give in to a society that asks you to fight against your nature anymore in order to belong. ‘I Tried To Tell You’ reminds us, “Would it kill you to believe in your pleasure?” Let’s believe. Let’s laugh again at the absurdity of it all. We’re here. We might as well. But we’ll also reduce, reuse, recycle, decrease our consumption of animal products, and love each other, if we can. To ease this burden on the individual, if we can. Only a fraction of it is our fault. We’ll be radically open and outrageously honest. We’ll be bad products and great humans. ☔