Loyalty

In excess virtue lies danger, or at least limits to pragmatic action-it's a lesson hard learned by anyone disillusioned by the erosion of youthful mythologies. Strict fealty to a fixed ideal of identity doesn't do us any favours as adults. Loyalty, the third and finest album yet by The Weather Station wrestles with these knotty notions of faithfulness/faithlessness-to our idealism, our constructs of character, our memories, and to our family, friends, and lovers-representing a bold step forward into new sonic and psychological inscapes.

It's a natural progression for Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman's acclaimed songwriting practice. Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris in the winter of 2014, in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), the record crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own.

Lindeman describes La Frette, housed in an enormous, crumbling 19th-century mansion, as "a secret garden, a place of enchantment and grace": walls mantled in ivy and lions, corridors piled high with discarded tape machines, old reels, and priceless guitars. As she puts it, "Recording where we did meant we embraced beauty-we weren't afraid of it being beautiful." Like the record itself, it's a quietly radical statement, especially since certain passages achieve a diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station. The stacked vocal harmonies of "Tapes," the drifting, jazz-inflected chording in "Life's Work," and the glacial percussion in "Personal Eclipse" contribute to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier's Occasional Rain.

Beyond the decaying decadence and vintage gear, the brokedown palace atmosphere of La Frette afforded a more significant interior luxury as well, one stated with brutal honesty in the stunning "Shy Women": "it seemed to me that luxury would be to be not so ashamed, not to look away." Accordingly, Loyalty brings a freshly unflinching self-examining gaze and emotional and musical control to The Weather Station's songs. She is an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist-on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibes-but Lindeman has always been a songwriter's songwriter, recognized for her intricate, carefully worded verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its discipline, its deliberate wording and exacting delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan.