The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour
Beautiful story telling narratives are a rarity in rock music, but that’s exactly what The Weakerthans have provided us with here—again. The vocal tricks and dexterity John K. Sampson uses to weave his poetry-prose into the band’s folk styled rock is quite wonderful in it’s apparent seamless ease and make The Weakerthans something pretty special and beloved to their fans.
It’s been a long wait since 2004′s Reconstruction Site but the album here is still very familiar and The Weakerthans as already known—there isn’t anything much in the way of new other than the stories the songs tell. In my mind that’s enough, when you have such a perfect sound for your art why go changing when you still have the imagination, empathy and talent to tell these new tales. Reunion Tour is however, overall, a more melancholy album than previous outings, the wistful nature of the tracks still somehow manages to be uplifting rather than totally depressing though. Is there such a thing as happy melancholy?
Starting out with the tale of a love sick bus driver, Civil Twilight is a song for anyone who has ever lost anyone and wandered, wondering. The thrumming bassline of Hymn of the Medical Oddity carrys over into Relative Surplus Value while it then turns down the folk and turns up the Rock to full tilt for a tale of exhausted failure. After a brief jaunt into the world of curling for Tournament of Hearts, Virtute the cat makes a return appearance (after having her plea on Reconstruction Site), this time round it’s a heart-breaking ballad of her life and regrets after leaving, reminiscing “I’d knead into your chest while you were sleeping. Shallow breathing made me purr.”
Elegy for Gump Worsley delves into a more spoken word style with minimal melody and instrumentation. Sun in an Empty Room has the happiest guitars of the album, jangling away while moving on from an old shared apartment room. Night Windows may regretfully be an attempt to be more radio-friendly than necessary, sounding the most commercial and ending up with the lyrics seeming disjointed at times. The albm then rolls into a song superficially about Bigfoot! with the haunting intro & outro try to convince you it’s only about some big hairy ape-like creature but the lyrics are written so well that there’s undertones of much, much more. Finishing up the album with the marching drums and plodding life-on-the-road guitar of Reunion Tour and finally the end of show wind down of Utilities won’t leave you in a joyous mood, but wistfully happy. It’s what The Weakerthans do best and do better than anyone else. Simply beautiful.
