Ignorance - 2021 European Fat Possum label Limited Indie Store Silver Vinyl 10-track LP

2021 5th album by Toronto born and based singer/songwriter Tamara Lindeman - begins enigmatically; a hissing hi hat, a stuttering drum beat.  A full minute passes before the entry of Tamara Lindeman’s voice, gentle, conversational, intoning; “I never believed in the robber”.  A jagged music builds, with stabbing strings, saxophone, and several layers of percussion, and the song undulates through five minutes of growing tension, seesawing between just two chords.  Once again, Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman has remade what The Weather Station sounds like; once again, she has used the occasion of a new record to create a new sonic landscape, tailor-made to express an emotional idea.  Ignorance, Lindeman’s debut for Mississippi label Fat Possum Records, is sensuous, ravishing, as hi fi a record as Lindeman has ever made, breaking into pure pop at moments, at others a dense wilderness of notes; a deeply rhythmic, deeply painful record that feels more urgent, more clear than her work ever has. 

Allmusics Heather Phares puts the music into describtion: "Instead of the acoustic backdrops of her early releases or the rock flourishes of The Weather Station, this time Lindeman drapes her uncomfortable truths in downright luxurious sounds. Combining the silkiness of late-'70s/early-'80s Roxy Music and Fleetwood Mac with the exploratory spirit of jazz, Ignorance's sophistication feels conspicuous but also precious, as though she's buffed her nuggets of truth to a mirrorlike sheen." 

The title of the album, Ignorance, feels confrontational, calling to mind perhaps wilful ignorance, but Lindeman insists she meant it in a different context.  In 1915 Virginia Woolfe wrote: “the future is dark, which is the best thing a future can be, I think.”  Written amidst the brutal first world war, the darkness of the future connoted for Woolfe a not knowing, which by definition holds a sliver of hope; the possibility for something, somewhere, to change.  In french, the verb ignorer connotes a humble, unashamed not knowing, and it is this ignorance Lindeman refers to here; the blank space at an intersection of hope and despair, a darkness that does not have to be dark. 

This is the independant stores limited edition silver vinyl only - picture cover stickered on outer shrink wrapping

Tracklisting:

Side 1:
1    Robber    
2    Atlantic    
3    Tried To Tell You    
4    Parking Lot    
5    Loss    

Side 2:
1    Separated    
2    Wear    
3    Trust    
4    Heart    
5    Subdivisions