SOUNDTRACK: THE WEATHER STATION-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #237 (July 20, 2021).
For a band this soft, there are sure a lot of players. I can’t even figure out what Philippe Melanson the second drummer (!) is doing for most of set. It’s especially amusing since at least initially The Weather Station was just one person: (singer here) Tamara Lindeman.
However, it’s the setting of the Home Concert that is so magical.
There’s a desk and a band playing songs filled with nature’s imagery somewhere in the woods of Mulmur in Southern Ontario, Canada. …. The songs for this Tiny Desk (home) concert are filled with imagery of nature and our relationship with our planet.
I like that they are really spread far apart–that the camera has to pan far left and right to catch everyone (although, really for most of the set it’s guitarist Christine Bougie and saxophone/ clarinet player Karen Ng who are off screen.
If Melanson is relatively quiet, full on drummer Kieran Adams is one of the loudest players here. In songs like “Robber” there’s almost nothing but drums (the rest of the music lays a bed on which the drums seem to skitter around). In fairness, Melanson does get to wail a lot of “Robber” as well, which is easily the most fun track here.
“Tried to Tell You” has a real 70s soft-rock vibe. It’s amusing, for instance, to watch keyboardist Johnny Spence as his hands literally don’t move almost the whole time that the camera is on him. I like the way the quiet guitar and clarinet bounce back and forth off of each other in this song.
The keyboard melody is much more prominent for “Parking Lot.” As with most of the song, the pulsing bass from Ben Whiteley is what really grounds the song.
With images of a blood-red sunset in the song “Atlantic” and the lines “Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind / I should really know better than to read the headlines / Does it matter if I see it? / No, really, can I not just cover my eyes?,” Tamara writes about her passion for the earth and its future, but the tunes are calming and thoughtful, not doctrines or lectures.
“Atlantic” has a nice pulsing feel with squiggly guitar lines. The spareness of these songs is really in evidence when you see that Bougie is often barely playing before jumping into a big flourish of notes
“Robber” is a six minute jazzy piece that slowly builds to some wild fun. The build up is spectacular and once again Bougie’s guitar work is terrific.
[READ: July 15, 2021] Oh, Boris!
My library gets all kinds of strange books–books that don’t really seem like they belong in a University library. But I believe they like to make sure they cover all of the bases–just in case.
Which explains why we have a book like this. A 6″x6″ square book that’s 64 pages and looks like it was conceived, written and published in a week.
I found this book while searching through old books to see if they could be cataloged (it actually fell out of the pile because it was so small). Perhaps the only really interesting thing about this is that it was written in 2016, a full three years before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. He had just been named Secretary of State (really!) around the publication of this book.
For those of us in the States who wondered how the Brits created such a buffoon, it’s worth noting that he was born in the United States (guess they should also have a law that a PM must be born in the country). (more…)
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I was shocked to discover that it had been SEVEN YEARS since we’d last seen Belle & Sebastian. I would have sworn that the show at the Mann was just a couple of years ago.
I Just Read About That... 