by Gianluigi Marsibilio (@GMarsibilio)
After only one year from an important shift in sound which took place through the record Ignorance, The Weather Station (aka Tamara Lindeman) has released How is it That I Should Look at The Stars. The EP finds new musical experimentation, always restarting, from the compositional transition between guitar and piano. The change indicates a direction that coincides with the ability to create a sound environment, increasingly tightened on a deeply marked intimacy and candor of the songs.
How Is It That I Should Look at The Stars also thrives on its construction: played in three days in an uninterrupted jam, it gives back the naturalness of a live show, which is accompanied by lyrics edited in detail. The album perhaps lives within the sonic contrasts of Ignorance. We are accustomed through contemporary culture to seriality, The Weather Station succeeds - at the same time - to be a point of coherence and rupture of her works, of her legacy. A rare gift.
If with Ignorance the focus was on a sound sustained by a pressing rhythmic line, for example with tracks like “Parking Lot”; in How is it That I Should Look at The Stars, the story is profoundly different. The quest is now centered on soundscapes designed to enhance the nuances of the orchestra, but above all to focus on Lindeman's ability to expand her self, through a piano and ten excellent songs. The exploration of the self, starts from some central elements, for example the aquatic images, the elements that recall landscapes that are intertwined between the environment and personal stories. A clear example is in “Marsh”:
So I took a walk down the road
And at the bottom of the hill
A little river overflowed
And a swamp in the eddy had filled the ditch
Water, often embodied by the image of the river and its incessant flow, has an important role in the album. How is it That I Should Look at The Stars, especially in tracks like “Ignorance,” surely lives through a fascinating and unique theme: the search or rather the necessity, sometimes bordering on a constraint, of giving names to things, feelings, possibilities. A clear semantic doubt emerges from the song:
I thought about the man who called it a magpie.
Confronted by the great expanse of his ignorance
He wanted to name it, to detain it forever in that small phrase
It seemed likе a shame to give it a name
The best-fitting metaphor is perhaps that of dice thrown, which gives different value to another one, a game of permutations and stories. The word is not only a cultural tool of communication but can be seen as a recognition of the intentions of the other. How is it That I Should Look at The Stars works precisely on this, on subtraction of arguments, sounds, and atmospheres. Not understanding is configured as a space of possibilities, as presented in “Ignorance”: “But thеn again/ I don't understand anything the way/ I'm supposed to/I drag every river for meaning, or in Stars: But how should I look at the stars tonight?/ At a million suns? None of them mine/ Nowhere up there is a place likе this /Not one waterfall, no river mist.”
How is it That I Should Look at The Stars is a record of linguistic misunderstandings, but we know that uncertainties are necessary for music, art, and life as well.