GutterPutter

Part-time environmental calling, part-time eloquent piece of indie-pop, The Weather Station’s fifth album have made a lot of wave in the past couple of days including an acclaim of a 9.0/10 from Pitchfork alongside a full 5/5 stars from The Guardian. Many hails its relevance & its music as being among the best of the year so far especially as many starts to take a look at the impending need to take action to preserve the environment. While the music press give the album heaps of praise for its direction, there are a handful of others who feel a bit underwhelmed as they tune in to see what the hype was all about. I am one of those people.

To start off, I would like to focus first of all on the strengths of the album. Its production with each playing of the piano, the plucking of the string instruments & the beating of the drums being well-accented without coming off as being too visceral for the album’s direction is the biggest plus I can give – it provides extra re-listenability & gives way to the listener to appreciate the cohesiveness of the band’s musical performances. The rhythm is generally tight & reminiscent of Wilco with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as does the chamber influences from the violin, adding much to the enjoyability of the record. One would suspect that with an overall solid performance coming from the instrumental side, ‘Ignorance’ would’ve at least be a great record. Not necessarily perfect, but it’s a kind of record that you would play over & over – just not with the fervour that you would have with your personal favourites.

However, there are some reservations that I have over the album & most of such tends to come in two form:

1. That it neither gives off the impression that its musical textures is groundbreaking/successfully avant-garde for its fellow works nor does the overall instrumentals, even though I’ve praised it for being nice & consistent, never feels like it goes far & beyond the quality or the impact comparable to their peers’s.

2. Tamara Lindeman’s singing & lyricism is… sleepy. Not in a positive sense where you can say that it’s tranquil & puts you in a peaceful state like Helios, but it’s more dreary, un-extraordinary at best & lacking in charisma to help pull you through with its themes.

The first point, while it may come off as being unfair since it’s rather subdued, the point stands mostly in a way as to infer that there never was a feeling of the instrumentals being special or distinct above all. The second point being that while there are some signs of relatively solid poetry that I’m fond of, it’s simply bland. Singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith or Sufjan Stevens shows allure in their writing through creating autobiographical anecdotes that enables the listener to connect to them in a human level. The lyricism for Ignorance, however, fails to captivate to say the least. For instance, let’s look at the second verse in ‘Atlantic’ as an example:

‘In the half light, soft wind on my skin

Pink clouds massing on the cliffs

Thinking how can I touch this

How can I touch this softest petal

Softest stem, softest leaf

Bending, green, in my palm?’

In theory, the mixture of both the whispery vocals from Lindeman’s singing alongside the focus on the perceived fragility of the flowers that syncs with the environmental theme enables a quiet, precocious insight into the relationship between the world and ourselves. However, it fails to leave a profound impression to me & I barely keep track of the lyrics until I decided to use Genius to try & look more into the lyrics in question. The inability to hit the synergy between the singing & the lyrics continues to stick throughout the album from the humdrum indifference I feel from ‘Robber’ all the way through to ‘Subdivisions’ – the potential is there but the lack of enthusiasm on Lindeman’s vocal performance undercuts, rather than gently rise, the impact of the record. This essentially leads to a rather pleasant lounge music with nice instrumental performance but there’s little to nothing about it that makes it truly great, let alone boundary-defying.

Thus, if you’re looking for an album that delivers on the climate ethos, solid lyrics & distinctive music, your best bet would be with over ten years ago with Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. If you’re looking more into a sophisticated kind of chamber-pop, even Weezer’s OK Human (which I’ll do a review later on) has it beat with its more orchestral focus to make up for its hit-and-miss lyrics. My inner cynicism bets therefore that Ignorance might turn out like Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters – a solid showing of craftsmanship, but it feels overhyped by the press thanks to the context, however important they were, that might lead to its legacy ageing poorly. Give it a listen if you’re interested in the hype, but reserve your praise if repeated listens starts to come off more like a chore than it does a reward.