Beautifully balanced, nuanced, delicate, intimate new experimental folk by Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman on a gorgeous seventh LP that goes to the individual and collective core of being alive, with a free-flowing semi-acoustic songs partly created by improvisation with her six-piece band, decorated with flurries of woodwind. Karen Ng supplies those gentle touches of saxophone, clarinet and flute, and as well as Ben Boye’s piano and shivery, fidgety syncopations of percussion and drums by Kieran Adams and Philippe Melanson, it is Lindeman’s delicate rhythmically unfettered singing voice, that at times echoes of the inflections of Joni Mitchell and the restless intelligence of Fiona Apple that makes you stop and listen. The album seems to have more energy freedom than 2022’s pared-back How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, and there’s a bravery and vulnerability in lyrics focused on individual and universal humanhood, a lesser used but self-explanatory titular word. Standouts include the lead single Neon Signs about breakdowns in trust, distorted perceptions in Mirror, claustrophobia in Window, the visceral, bare skin in water experience in the title track, or loser Sewing, a wonderful metaphor for the imperfect complexities and patchwork of ourselves and lives, and an antidote to the binary, reactionary thinking that pervades so much of online culture. But there’s a lot more to immerse into in this delicious, complex, flickering, flittering, powerful album of true beauty. Out on Fat Possum.
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