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Recorded over 20 years after "As Tears Go By", "Strange Weather" demonstrates Marianne's darker, more mature side. This is the album of a woman who has lived (and almost died), and has chosen to express herself through the medium of Berlin cabaret songs, compositions by Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Jerome Kern. (These same themes and styles would be returned to again over the next ten years, for example in "20th Century Blues" in 1996.)
Then, of course, there is THAT song. Gone is the sweet, chirpy, throwaway pop version of the 60s; in is the angst, the pain of everything associated with being an iconoclastic survivor whose "riches can't buy everything".
The voice is fractured, tortured and that of a woman deep in reflection. The album is intelligent, accessible and near-perfect, from the evocative "Strange Weather", to the camp Berlin cabaret of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", to the achingly painful "Yesterdays", and the startling acapella defiance of "Ain' Goin' Down to the Well No Mo'".
This is a classic and timeless album in the true sense of the word. When listened along side "Broekn English" and "A Secret Life", it represents part of a trilogy of the greatest work of one of Britain's most brilliant, demanding, controversial, and essential female artistes.
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.
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.
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.
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