The weather station

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

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