The Weather Station - Loyalty (2015)

Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited.

Tamara Lindeman is no longer singing about white lilacs, wild columbine, rhubarb pie and big jars of honey. On two previous albums as the Weather Station, Lindeman used acoustic guitars, banjos and a lexicon of bucolic imagery to write graceful, generous folk songs. The material wasn’t simple so much as vernacular, so that even the Toronto songwriter’s most intense reflections on love and lust espoused a downhome familiarity.

But Loyalty, Lindeman’s third and best LP, continues the inward pull of last year’s incisive EP, What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know. Her once-plaintive confessionals have morphed into intimate but impressionistic character studies, where the songwriter spares neither herself nor her subjects an analytical eye. And the acoustic instruments that once galloped or crept behind her have morphed into abstract backdrops—sophisticated but understated settings that accent the expressive voice above them. Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited.

To make Loyalty, Lindeman and a minimal crew decamped to a deteriorating French mansion for a long wintertime recording session. Collaboration has long been integral to the Weather Station’s records, from a set of duets released in 2013 to the way in which Everything was recorded by two different bands in two different countries. But only Bahamas leader and multi-instrumentalist Afie Jurvanen and accomplished engineer Robbie Lackritz joined Lindeman along the Seine. They shared production duties, while Lindeman and Jurvanen split a dozen instruments evenly. These 11 songs often suggest you’re sitting with the trio in some small parlor as they play. The drums shuffle or canter quietly. The guitars stay hushed. The only real instrumental break, the smoldering electric coda at the end of "Tapes", remains gentle, hinting at an outburst but never delivering it. And whether hitting the brassy highs of "I Could Only Stand By" or the diffident lows of "Personal Eclipse", Lindeman’s voice rarely rises above an elegant whisper. It’s as if she’s trusting these revelations only to the people in the room.