Seeking solace:
Jane Weaver
NICCHAPMAN
JANE WEAVER is playing a very good long game. She’s just turned 52 and has spent over 30 of those years deeply involved in music in Manchester –from her early bands Kill Laura and Misty Dixon to her free-flowing solo output and more wayward projects such as Fenella and Neo-Tantrik –and yet this latest release, Love In Constant Spectacle, is by some distance her most satisfying album. Full of surprises and tantalisingly familiar, it’s the sound of Weaver stretching out and drawing from her wealth of experience to fashion a heartfelt, head-spinning account of grief and solace.
Viewing the curve of her career, you can see how she got here: 2014’s The Silver Globe and its follow-up Modern Kosmology packaged her hippie-ish idealism in proggy chansons and Can-like grooves, a homespun blend of Hawkwind and Hot Chocolate that paved the way for Flock in 2021. This, she’d decided, was to be her pop breakthrough, one she’d play to her swelling fanbase at numerous festivals. She studied the hits of Hall & Oates and the BeeGees and emulated the parts that worked for her, producing an array of celestial psych nuggets like “The Revolution Of Super Visions” and “Heartlow” that sounded great on the radio. The pandemic scuppered most of her plans –she only finished touring that record in March last year –but Flock certainly helped Weaver take flight.