Customer Reviews

Strange Weather

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a wonderful album for feeling kind of melancholy. Faithfull's cracked voice has an odd kind of beauty, yet her songs are full of sorrow.

I love listening to this album when I'm a bit blue, and have found it to wear well over the years.

Sorrowful without being maudlin. I'd recommend it.

Strange Weather is Marianne Faithfull's masterpiece.

To me, it's as good as an album gets. Why? It's like looking into a soul, which, to me, is the highest virtue of art: to lay out the human condition as a truly honest expression of the author. The truth here is so profoundly expressed that even a song that shouldn't by any stretch belong to Marianne Faithfull, "Ain't Goin' Down," rolls through her voicebox like something she might have said in a half-sleep, a revelation.

Yes, it's melencholy; yes, it is melodramatic. But the songs and the album are "of a piece," like an old engine that cranks with every tune and starts up with just the same reliable grind and effortless churn.

It's truly beautiful, from beginning to end. While I love 20th Century Blues as well, I don't get that from any other Marianne Faithfull album. But I don't need it from any other. We have the purest, truest expression, right here.

When this album came out in '87, a critic called it "music to slit your wrists by." Marianne took it as a compliment. The CD is definitely a downer to those unfamiliar with Marianne. With this, she explores old blues and torch standards, and also does a new version of "As Tears Go By," her first hit back in '64, updating to suit her much-changed voice, and sinking her teeth into the intense world-weary feel of the lyrics. She also does a version of "Yesterdays," first done by Lady Day herself, Billie Holiday. A real highlight, that one. Even Sinatra couldn't do that one justice. While I wouldn't recommend it as an intro to Marianne's music, it is definitely a treasure and proves that Marianne Faithfull is an artist worth her weight in gold (even though she doesn't have many gold records to back that up).

Elton John once sang that "sad songs say so much," and this album is a great example of what he meant. Marianne Faithfull's 'Strange Weather' is full of down, moody music -- but that's what makes it so appealing. I can't think of another album that is so bleak, yet so comforting, with the execption of Frank Sinatra's 'Only the Lonely.'

When I am feeling blue, I can play 'Strange Weather' and just relax and feel at ease. It's like an old friend in times of turmoil.

Unburdening herself from hard-living for the first time in years, Marianne allows her ravaged pipes to frame her emotions in each and every word of these songs. There's a romance to her interpretations that innately is her art. Her intelligent revivals of Billie Holiday's "Yesterdays" and Leadbelly's "I Ain't Goin' Down To The Well No More" can largely be attributed to her skilled phrasing. She knowingly captures the image of conquest in Tom Waits' "Strange Weather" and exercises self-restraint on a definitive cover of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine". She reconceives "As Tears Go By" much more worldly-wise than her take on it back in 1964. But if there's one cut that gives this work its theme, it's "Love, Life and Money". Armed with only the succor of Mac Rebannack's brilliant bluesy piano and her own vocal, it's her blues invocation of deliverance.

There's contrasting moods and no succumbing to nostalgia, hence making this a wholly successful record. The band arrangements are economical. The guitarists, whether Robert Quine or Bill Frisell, subtly provide a safe-setting. This has been her life experience and she emerges a visible champion.

Marianne stopped using drugs in 85. Strange Weather is her first album drug-free, so in a sense, Marianne's third career begins with this album. Its appropriate Marianne sings As Tears Go By, vocally Marianne sings it with more emotion, musically the style is less poppy than the original, and more of a ballad. Comparing the two is a moot point, the point is that Marianne sings it all. This album reflects a survivor, which Marianne truly is.

Length:: 1:42 Mins

This introspective and melancholic 1987 album of covers represents Faithfull's take on the blues but there's also some gospel and a torch song or two. Strange Weather is a collection of famous and lesser known compositions by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, The Stones, Leadbelly, Jerome Kern, Doc Pomus and Dr John, amongst others. The album is highly rated by most music critics but not particularly accessible to the casual fan.

Her interpretations are mostly slow, subdued and understated, as on Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, I Ain't Goin' Down To The Well No More, Yesterdays and the Tom Waits song Strange Weather. Highlights of the album include Dylan's I'll keep it With Mine, this awesome rendition of her 1960s hit As Tears Go By and the melancholy and moving folk song Sign Of Judgment.

The overall impression is one of detachment, not unlike A Secret Life, her collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti. I am thus not sure that fans of her pop-rock style will like it. But Strange Weather is definitely worth it for the tracks As Tears Go By and Sign Of Judgment. More accurate rating: three and a half stars. The album has been reissued with her Broken English masterpiece of 1979, showcasing two very different styles and phases of Faithfull's career.