The weather station

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

A new solo album by a former Beatle that – astonishingly – demands repeated plays

For artists lacking any obvious feel for the style, ‘going country’, similar to mainstream white artists dabbling in reggae in the 1970s following the breakthrough of Bob Marley, tends to elicit the sour whiff of a morning after the last chance saloon. Particularly at a time when a slick multi-hyphenate brand of country music is the pop trend du jour, carpetbagging and bandwagonism abounds. The lyrics on Look Up are elementary to the point of banality, which is as it should be Ringo Starr needn’t worry. Starr is the cowboy Beatle. He has loved this music from a young age, which is a long time. The Beatles wisely facilitated his

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Fabulously boring: Weather Station’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars reviewed

Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a delicious pink donut, downtown T.O. and soaring mountain peaks, displaying the beauty, vitality and vibrancy of the country? It made me want to visit. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me there now – that glorious, vast expanse now the sine qua non of smugness and condescension. It has become a terminally precious country and we should withdraw our ambassador, or invade (that being the fashion). Weather Station, led by the fabulously irritating Tamara Lindeman, were once okayish indie folkies who have now become pretentious, half-assed purveyors of somnambulant fake jazz, like

Thursday

Michael Hann

Reminiscent of Roxy Music’s cocktail sound: The Weather Station reviewed

One of the unforeseen consequences of the rise of streaming was a change in the very structure of the pop song. Listeners who needed only to click a button to explore an unfathomable amount of music rapidly lost patience. They were less willing to listen to long songs; they were less willing to wait for songs to develop, even over the course of three minutes; they liked songs that sounded the same as other songs they were familiar with. And so, over the past decade or so, pop has adopted a formula: songs now tend to open with a huge hook, then throw more hooks on top of that, and