FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Forty: Jane Weaver
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THERE is a timelessness…
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Votel
to including Jane Weaver in Modern Heroines, as she released her album, Flock, last month. I am going to introduce some interviews with Weaver and reviews of Flock soon. This is an album that you will want to own:
“Flock is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation.
The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but Flock is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk.
Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is The Revolution Of Super Visions, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates Flock and concludes on Solarised, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night.
The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphise”.
Flock is Jane Weaver’s eleventh studio album, so she is someone who has been in the industry for a little while. Even though she has a large fanbase now, I feel she will go on to become an icon whop inspires so many artists. She seems not to have lost any quality and power since albums like Seven Day Smile in 2006. I want to bring in a 2018 interview from The Skinny (Weaver released Modern Kosmology in 2017 and Loops in the Secret Society in 2019):
“Hailing from the fringes of the north-west indie/alt-rock scene, Jane Weaver is a prolific, resilient artist – if not a central figure, an important outlier working consistently in an industry and genre that can at times be outright hostile to women. Having fronted acts Kill Laura and Misty Dixon in the 90s and early 00s respectively, and after earning such famous fans as John Peel, Lauren Laverne and Jarvis Cocker, Weaver noticed a distinct decline in a certain subsection of her musical counterparts. “A lot of my male peers were going from strength to strength and a lot of my female peers were just dropping off and I thought, 'What’s going on here?' And it’s not because everybody who was female was rubbish, there just weren’t the places to go, there just weren’t the paths available.”
Weaver reacted by carving out her own space in the music industry for women and others who maybe struggled with traditional paths. In 2002, she launched her own independent label, Bird Records. “I started [the label] to be open to people who wanted to release a single, like a small single, and then go on somewhere else, and it was also to release my own music. I’d had several record deals that hadn’t gone well and my manager at the time just said to me, even though I had an album to go, 'I can’t get you arrested, it’s just boy guitar bands here.' And I thought it was ridiculous. It’s not that I didn’t have good songs or good ideas or a good work ethic, it was just the fashion for the boy guitar bands. It’s always been the predominant thing and it still is now. It’s upsetting.”
Weaver is cautiously optimistic about change in an industry that can be conservative and misogynistic. “[Festivals] have signed that Keychange pledge” in an effort to battle gender disparity in music festival bookings, “where they say by 2022 there’s going to be more of a balance. I think it will take a long time, I don’t know why, but it’s probably to do with financial issues, probably big festivals will go for the men with guitars for some reason, I don’t know!” she laughs.
Weaver has been touring tirelessly with her band of late, playing her most recent and perhaps best-received album yet, 2017's Modern Kosmology. Her new Loops in the Secret Society tour, which kicks off on 17 October at Edinburgh’s Pleasance, is a solo audiovisual reworking of both Modern Kosmology and her 2014 album The Silver Globe, a record Weaver endearingly considers “a mini breakthrough” because it had her phone ringing off the hook with gig and press offers. Loops in the Secret Society is her first solo tour in over five years and comes with its own unique set of challenges. “It just means that I’m under more pressure to play stuff live and do it on my own. I can manage everything, it’s fine, it’s just the brain pressure of knowing that you have to do it. It’s like a one man band having to do so many things at once, where I’m not just like walking about the stage and pointing and stamping on the floor and singing. It’s maybe a little more. And maybe I won’t have two drinks before I go on stage, I’ll maybe just have half of one!”.
There are not too many interviews available online for Flock. I did see a good one that she conducted for Louder Than War, where we learn some good insight regarding the album’s themes and inspiration:
“The very word “Flock” conjures up the same things the album does at times: collectiveness, nature. What’s the significance of it as an album title/the album’s title track?
I didn’t want the record to be conceptual like others I’d done, but I did have this idea about the first track and that it would be a dramatic opener entering a sonic wood and surrounded by nature and birds! But yes, Flock is a collection of pop songs that I don’t think lend themselves to just one thing, I just went with the flow and looked at each song individually. The artwork features me in a peacock chair surrounded by birdboxes waiting for the flock to return.
The way you deal with “the revolution” as a supernatural force has a somewhat Jungian undertone. How do you think these plague years have affected our collective unconscious – especially in music and the arts?
I can’t help thinking that musicians and artists and the supporting industry feel very undervalued at the minute, it’s understandable that gigs had to stop but we follow the rules and we still have rent to pay, a lot of people have had zero support, and Brexit rules are now another thing to navigate. Digital streaming is a great invention but lockdown has highlighted the problem that streaming for a lot of artists is unfair, the combination of all of these is quite a lot to deal with in a short space of time especially living in a pandemic. I think there is a strong collective energy and I’m hoping something positive will come out of this when we return!
You talk on the album about wanting to smash the patriarchy and the nature of the industry. In the wake of Me Too, where do we go from here?
Keep promoting equality and calling out bad behaviour, its inspiring to see bold moves from successful female artists who’ve been faced with an abuse of power from those they’ve worked with closely and they once trusted, the threat of someone deliberately trying to undermine and dismantle your career is hideous, just because they can. Taylor Swift and Kesha continue to fight back and empower themselves after the experiences they’ve been through, and its also highlighting what actually goes on in the world and exposing sexism and the dark side of the music industry”.
I am going to end with a playlist of some of her best tracks through the years. As Flock is new and it has won big critical praise, I thought it would be useful to bring in a couple of examples. This is what AllMusic said when they spent time with Flock:
“Throughout the second half of the 2010s, Jane Weaver hit her musical stride, releasing two albums that combined shimmering synths, alternately propulsive and languid tempos, and Weaver's trilling vocals into something magical. 2014's Silver Globe and 2017's Modern Kosmology are both mini-masterpieces of dream-meets-synth pop and showed that she basically had mastered that style. After a digression into experimental electronics on 2017's Loops in the Secret Society and a record of avant-garde indie rock with her band Fenella, Weaver set out to make a more diverse-sounding album that reflected a wider range of her musical interests. Where her work in the 2010s flowed from song to song like a masterful DJ set, 2021's Flock comes across more like a greatest-hits album as she bounces from style to style. Thumping post-Goldfrapp electro-glam ("Stages of Phases") jostles with laid-back summer jams ("Sunset Dreams"); loopy electro ballads ("All The Things You Do") rub against future funk that sounds like Prince and Broadcast fighting it out ("Pyramid Schemes"); and tracks like "Modern Reputation" that have the wibbly, synth prog feel of Dots and Loops-era Stereolab -- right down to channeling the celestial vocal interplay of Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen -- nestle nicely alongside more traditionally Weaver-esque offerings ("Heartlow"). Only "The Revolution of Super Visions" stumbles just a bit due to it being a touch too naggingly catchy, but the sheer beauty of the album's closing track makes up for that. On the truly radiant "Solarised," she does a one-woman Saint Etienne impression, matching a pulsing disco-house rhythm with synths warm enough to melt the ice on a bleak winter sidewalk and a melody that reaches the heights of emotion thanks to the truly lovely vocals. The song is a highlight on an album full of them; Weaver's artistic progression continues to be stunning. She could have kept making the same wonderful dream pop albums over and over until the world ended and that would have been fine. For her to take the template she had perfected and apply it to slightly different styles of music is a daring move and it works out very well, to say the least. Flock is the work of a daring artist, a crafty writer and performer, and someone who is always worth following to see what kind of great things she might do in the future”.
In another glowing review, The Line of Best Fit were keen to provide plenty of positivity and praise for a terrific album:
“Perhaps the irrepressible hooks and rejoicefully juicy grooves that characterize Flock – best of which bring up vivid impressions of Funkadelic jamming with Tangerine Dream, or Prince developing a Hawkwind habit - are an inevitable development. 2015’s The Silver Globe and 2017's Modern Kosmology stood out amongst a procession of Can and Neu! aficionados due to Weaver’s blanket refusal to give in to the usual stoned noodling of artists who spend their disposable income on rare 1970’s German vinyl and malfunctioning vintage kit. Having found a comfortably fitting sound after earlier dabbles with psych-folk and indie-rock, Weaver stood pretty much alone in her ability to combine motorik momentum-building with dense, synth-saturated atmospherics with soaring songcraft.
If the recent one-woman live reinterpretation of those albums’ material (Loops in the Secret Society) leaned heavy on its abstract and experimental potential, Flock represents the sweet revenge of the melody: dancefloor-friendly pop music, but of a variety that remains intoxicatingly unmoored to the conventions and codes of the earthly realm.
Take first single “The Revolution of Super Visions” as an example. Blessed with plenty of fresh wide open spaces between the sparingly administered notes, the track’s chicken-scratch funk guitar strokes and rubbery bass bubbles bring to mind something George Clinton might have cooked up in the early 80’s, had Parliament ever directed the mothership to Can’s studio: maximalist funk-pop with minimalist ingredients. “Pyramid Schemes” is an even more successful example of Weaver’s brave new method of stripping away dense layers of sound to expose the full bounce of the tunes and the grooves.
It’s not all mirror ball-hugging disco queen moves, however (and even when it is, Weaver’s ear for the unusual places this particular dancefloor somewhere on the furthest and headiest fringes of the cosmos): the flute-saturated, gently galloping title track resembles the pastoral prog-funk of Dungen, whilst the majestic upward trajectory of the synth-heavy dream-pop closer “Solarised” defies categorization while it floats weightlessly amidst the cosmos, as heartwarming as a beautiful sunrise”.
I have been listening to Jane Weaver’s music for a number of years now and it is amazing that she is so consistent and incredible. I think that we will see a lot more music come from one of the finest artists in Britain. If you are fairly new to Weaver, take a dive into her back catalogue and experience an artist who released one of this year’s best albums with Flock. One would forgive an artist for dropping some quality and originality after eleven studio albums. That is not the case with Jane Weaver! Keep an eye on her Twitter account, as it seems like rehearsals are taking place for live music. That will be exciting to see! I love Jane Weaver’s sound, so I am very interested to see…
WHAT arrives next.