The Weather Station

How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

Through ambiguous lyrics and soothing falsettos, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is a solid album worth praise.

Given the deeply vulnerable quality of all the tracks on How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars ... Lindeman’s instincts to allow them to breathe—recording them as simply as possible in an improvisational way—reveals a different facet of her songcraft, one that’s just as accomplished as the arguably more accessible sound of Ignorance.

Without drums or percussion, Tamara Lindeman's voice and piano set the vigilant, wondering tone; clarinet, saxophone and flute allow subtle fluctuations in light and heat.

Tamara Lindeman’s follow-up to Ignorance can be enjoyed with or without the contextual groundwork of its sister album, for it contains fantastic songs.

A worthy follow-up to Ignorance and an accomplished work in its own right, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars makes the most of Lindeman's softly insightful powers.

On the companion piece to last year’s Ignorance, the Weather Station creates a piano-based record just as existentially anxious but anchored by quietude.

Performed almost entirely at the piano, the follow-up to Tamara Lindeman’s 2021 breakthrough Ignorance raises dizzying questions with sensitivity and quiet hope.

While much of Lindeman’s recent work spotlights her knack for lush arrangements and declarative statements, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars accentuates her nuanced artistry, including her gift for vocal and sonic restraint and lyrical precision.

If you’re a fan of Tamara and The Weather Station, I think that you’ll thrill at this album’s rawness. If you’re not a fan yet, this isn’t the album to start getting to know the music.

As opposed to the rich, twisted dreamscape of Ignorance, Stars is a record of dense and oblique beauty. While one could hide from the bleak truths of Ignorance in it’s dazzling sounds, no such thing is possible here. This makes for a far more intense and challenging listening experience.

The problem with See the Stars is that Lindeman’s lyrics are the only thing that really holds one’s attention throughout. If you were presented with the album, and told it wasn’t an album at all, but rather a collection of piano-centric variations on songs that would exist in a more fleshed-out form elsewhere, it would be ridiculously easy to believe it.