NOTE: All photos are copyright of Dean Keim 2025
The experimental folk-rock band The Weather Station came down from their Toronto homeland to grace NYC with a pair of performances for their Humanhood Tour and I was fortunate to catch their first show at the Bowery Ballroom, for which I received every ounce of artful display and deep conceptual artistry that I expected from this chamber-pop powerhouse. This band blends art-rock, free-form jazz, and numerous other genres and sounds into an intoxicating brew that can really bewitch the senses. The group is the brainchild of lead singer and guitarist Tamara Lindeman, who is also known as an actress with roles in movies like The Deep End and Shall We Dance and TV parts in the Disney series Stepsister from Planet Weird and the show Murdoch Mysteries, but since around 2006 she has also been cultivating this very deeply profound musical aura and brilliant stage show that has evolved over time into the amazing performance seen on this tour.
Opening the show was the poetic folk artist Hannah Frances who hails from Southern Virginia, but her voice and lyrics feel like she sees past all borders and boundaries, and she leads you into unseen worlds deep inside your inner psyche. She often plays with a larger ensemble but, for this opening gig, she was performing as a solo conjurer of truly magical incantations. She also mixes elements of jazz and art rock into her music when playing with a larger crew, but in her stripped-down guise she displays a raw country-flavored sound with lyrics that often deal with internal renovation and healing because of grief and heartbreak. At one point, she even said she loves coming to the Big Apple as “many of my exes live here so I love coming here,” and you felt the weight of the nearby presence of her past loves weighing on her soul on songs like the “Bronwyn” with its swirling emotions and harmonies. Much of her set sounded as though it was from her newest effort from last year called “Keeper of the Shepherd”, a real magical potion that you should drink down liberally. I was also spellbound by a deeply enchanting new song “Steady in the Hand” that closed her set, a song that really had me looking forward to where she may be going musically.
Click on photos to enlarge
When The Weather Station came on stage, it was clear this was going to be an otherworldly experience. There were three Stonehenge-type obelisks behind the band that evidentially symbolized the three stages of a lifetime of experience and Humanhood, which is also the name of their newest album. Projected on the stone-like objects were a myriad of lights and videos that seemed to symbolize each of these conceptual phases and really helped set the mystical mood of the show. Music of the first section was almost only lit by these stone-face projections, shrouding the band in almost complete darkness, but in the subsequent two parts the shade began to lift, and the full band became more illuminated as they pushed further into the inner worlds of emotion. The lineup was an extraordinary arrangement of talent including bassist Ben Whiteley who has been in the band since its beginnings, keyboardist Ben Boye, and drummer Dom Billett, but I can’t help but feel the sax and flute player Karen Ng really stole the show with some strikingly improvisational free jazz wails that really gave some of the songs some real experimental heft.
Tamara’s dynamically wild lyrical power and gloriously harmonic delivery make her a frontwoman powerhouse, but she was clearly really channeling a new energy with this show, as I heard none of her older tracks in the set. Instead, the setlist was dominated by the entire new album with a scattering of songs from 2021’s Ignorance mixed into the set like “Parking Lot,” “Tried to Tell You,” and “Atlantic.” However, it was new tunes like “Neon Signs,” “Mirror,” and “Robber” that really stole the show for me. She thanked her fans for the journey repeatedly throughout the show, and she mentioned how it was tough as a Canadian to tour the States right now given the political climate, but she encouraged everyone not to give up hope, and her music continues to fill me with lots of optimism for the future of conceptual art in contemporary music.
Click on photos to enlarge
