headlessparrot's Full Review: Reunion Tour [Digipak] by The Weakerthans
Most bands only wish they could make an album as brilliant as the Weakerthans’ Reconstruction Site. Most bands spend the entirety of their career striving for that kind of brilliance. So I guess it’s understandable that when a group of musicians does attain that height, they – for right or wrong – spend the rest of their career in the shadow of that monument. Part of me recognizes that this is fundamentally unfair: given that so few artists attain these mountainous heights in the first place, it seems unduly cruel to criticize that artist for failing to scale them a second time. It’s as though we cheered exuberantly for Sir Edmund Hillary as he crested the summit of Everest, and then – before he had even reached sea level – told him, “Do it again, or it was a fluke.” Or maybe, to refine the metaphor, they’ve witnessed his fifteen minutes spent at the summit and pointed out, “Well yes, but right now you’re only standing at 10,000 feet.” Once you’ve achieved greatness, the game changes, and greatness becomes something beyond greatness. This is a classic case of “what have you done for me lately,” and one that speaks to the willingness of critics – although it’s certainly not exclusively the provenance of critics – to tear down what others have taken so much care to build up. Mind you, I am not arguing for critical timidity, or a willingness to give a pass to those who have done well in the past. I am merely arguing for a criticism that moves beyond a need to contextualize an artist’s trajectory based solely on one or two transcendent recordings.
But in a sound byte society, that’s not going to happen - in part, I guess, because if we were content with greatness in the past, there’d be no drive for greatness in the future, like the sprinters who are continually breaking their own world records (I’m not particularly persuaded by this argument, because it ignores the inborn drive of those who aspire to great things). But more importantly, because even I, the person advocating this particular view of popular music, am hopelessly mired in the very habits I’ve criticized. I can find no other manner in which to describe the Weakerthans’ fifth album, Reunion Tour, than by way of its aforementioned predecessor, Reconstruction Site.
And because this is a concrete example, and not just an abstract observation, this is even more fundamentally unfair: in spite of the fact that Reunion Tour is an all-but perfect record, it’s marred (‘marred’ is perhaps an unfair characterization) by the “uhh... so?” characterization that it’s not as good as Reconstruction Site. Given that I can envision a persuasive argument for Reconstruction Site as one of the ten best records of the 2000s, this actually means that Reunion Tour must still be a pretty damn good record. Unfortunately – and based on the fact that they’re pretty similar sounding affairs, on the whole – the possibly-valid question is raised, why should you listen to Reunion Tour when you can listen to something just like it, only better? And aside from ‘variety’ (which is a pretty weak response), I’m not sure that I have answer. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t take anything away from the fact that – context aside – Reunion Tour is (like Reconstruction Site, but maybe less so) a really, really good album. The most obvious parallel to this phenomenon is found in the discography of that Canadian collective, Broken Social Scene. Their sophomore album, You Forgot It In People, is one of those career-defining LPs. Its eponymous follow-up – while still great by any objective measure I can come up with – simply seems kind of average in comparison. So really, seems is the key word here.
Let’s be honest: aside from some minor electronic experiments – amounting, more or less, to some blips, bleeps, and tape loops – Reunion Tour doesn’t bring anything truly new to the table for the Weakerthans. Which is possibly the only reason that I’m not 100 per cent enthusiastic about it. These are still the same old Weakerthans, lead by the same old John K. Samson, proffering the same old kind of hyper-literate folk-punk that they have been since Samson left Propagandhi and started his own band. But same old is perfectly okay in at least one sense, in that – for all of Samson’s apparent contentment to return to the same creative wave through the entirety of the band’s four albums – just the premise of hyper-literate folk-punk is something unique (and compelling) enough on its own merits that it requires few tweaks, even over the course of those four albums. In my review of Reconstruction Site, I characterized the Weakerthans as an equal parts blend of Ted Leo, the Decemberists, and the Shins. In retrospect, I might have also added a fourth measure, of the Mountain Goats, to round out the recipe.
The truth is that when you hear the Weakerthans for the first time, they sound, at times, like a fairly conventional indie-rock/pop-punk ensemble – right down to Samson’s nasally vocals. What has always distinguished them from this damning categorization is simply how smart they are, and how much this intelligent, academic sensibility comes through in their music. See, for an obvious example, the tongue-in-cheek application of the Shakespearean sonnet on Reconstruction Site, or the playful modernist-post-modernist debate that underpins “Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961).” Reconstruction Site remains the only rock album I’ve heard that makes use of these kinds of intellectual exercises. What’s more remarkable is that Samson and his band are able to play these scholarly games without straying too far from popular convention – without alienating, as it were, the casual listener. Make no mistake: the Weakerthans are, to some extent, nerd rock. But they’re very different from nerd rock in that they’re less concerned with virtuosity and technical brilliance than they are with a liberal arts sensibility. They represent, as I wrote in my review of Reconstruction Site, the perfect synthesis of high and low culture. Or, more accurately, the perfect dissemination of high culture (academia) by way of low culture (rock and roll).
But ironically enough, this has actually alienated an unusual audience; namely, the indie rock hipster-types (see Pitchfork Media and Cokemachineglow, and their lukewarm reactions to the Weakerthans) that the band seems scientifically engineered to please. My point is (and I owe my thanks to former Epinioner cryptosicko for clearing my thoughts in this matter), in any case, that this audience has a difficult time taking Samson and his band at face value, and so assume the worst: because they seem engineered to please an indie-hipster audience, then it must be so. There’s no room left for the possibility that the Weakerthans are instead just the earnest yield of a likeminded artist. A friend recently mentioned to me that she had been “mocked mercilessly for being that girl and loving "The Reasons" and the ongoing story of Virtute the cat.” This, as far as I’m concerned, gets to the core of the problem – that disliking the Weakerthans is an easy, knee-jerk reaction. that illustrates, I think, the hipster fear of addressing ones own securities. If you can only appreciate everything on an ironic level, after all, you can never experience anything genuine. Pitchfork strayed dangerously close to enlightened self-awareness in this regard, in 2006 when contributor Matt LeMay addressed rumours that Dan Bejar's album, Destroyer's Rubies, would receive their coveted 10.0 rating:
"It wasn't until I actually sat down and gave Destroyer's Rubies a few good listens that the aptness of such a rumor really hit me: The album is structurally complex, thematically dense, and labyrinthine in its self-referentiality. Dan Bejar's vocals are, like many of his indie contemporaries, yelpy and dramatic, and many of his lyrics seem preordained to serve as mp3 blog headers. In other words, the qualities that once made Destroyer albums so "difficult" make Destroyer's Rubies a perfect record for this critical moment."
That they ended up assigning Destroyer's Rubies an 8.5 - while Reunion Tour garnered a 5.9 - reflects a troubling discomfort that Pitchfork has in addressing their own prejudices; especially given that LeMay's checklist of greatness correlates pretty strongly with the kind of music that the Weakerthans are (and have been for a long time) making. Let’s face it: there’s nothing not to like about the ongoing saga of Virtute the cat. It’s sad, it’s sweet, it’s beautifully composed, and it’s heartbreakingly earnest. And the same can be said for most – if not all – of the Weakerthans’ catalogue.
While Reunion Tour features nothing as immediately heady as Reconstruction Site (aside from, maybe “Relative Surplus Value” or “Hymn of the Medical Oddity,” although it’s entirely possible that I’m missing some of its more esoteric intellectualism), it’s still a pretty damn smart record, filled with dazzling lyrical imagery. Moreover, while the band has always been fixated on their Canadian-ness (for example, Samson’s love/hate ode to Winnipeg, “One Great City”), Reunion Tour is even more of a platform for the comprehensive exploration of Canadian identity, viewed through narratives that are deftly informed by their unique cultural logic. The argument against is that this cultural backbone senselessly “regionalizes” (for lack of a better signifier) Reunion Tour, making it somehow less-than-universal. I think, however, that this perspective takes a needlessly superficial view of the record. Because for all of the easy snark about Canadian habits – “Tournament of Hearts” may be the first rock song ever set in a curling rink, and “Elegy For Gump Worsley” pays sincere tribute to a hockey icon – the real Canadian narratives are best read between the lines and in the small details, in the way, for example, that winter riders of public transit “bite their mitts off to show me transfers, deposit change.” And for all its surface triviality, this is an experience that cuts across national (though not necessarily geographic) boundaries.
And it’s with exactly that image that Reunion Tour begins. “Civil Twilight” is one of many mid-tempo rockers, marinated with a bit of tremolo, and recounted from the perspective of a Winnipeg Transit bus driver whose thoughts turn repeatedly from the tedium of his job (“Hey, every other hour I pass that house...”) to a failed relationship (“...Where you told me that you had to go”). Samson’s stream-of-consciousness narrator deftly (unconsciously?) deflects his own heartbrokenness by fixating himself on the trivial minutiae of his memories (“I wonder if the landlord has fixed the crack / That I stared at / Instead of staring back at you”), and by forcing the end of each thought to bleed into the beginning of the next. The result, paradoxically, is even more quietly sad, for both our narrator and the listener. “Hymn of the Medical Oddity” is a much slower follow-up, a tense and twangy ballad told from the perspective of David Reimer, who – after a botched circumcision – was raised as a girl and studied as a test case in the social construction of gender. And the song’s muted denouement, “If they remember me at all / Make them remember me / As more than a queer experiment, more than a diagram in their quarterly,” is a fitting – and troubling – post-script to Reimer’s 2004 suicide.
“Relative Surplus Value” again changes gear, in a glimpse of the dot-com bust paired with the classic narrative of the prodigal son (viewed, no less, through the lens of the Marxist theory referenced in its title). Samson’s narrator loses his job amidst corporate uncertainty, and is backed into a corner by his own uncertainty, asking an unnamed party, discomfort palpable, “So what I’m trying to say / I mean what I’m asking is / I know we haven’t talked in awhile / But could you come get me?” The song’s music is a perfect complement to its narrative; throbbing and percussive, so frantic that reflection is made impossible until the – made over deflating drums – uncertain plea for help of its final lines. “Bigfoot!” is Reunion Tour’s most subdued moment, a barely two-minute long strummed acoustic ballad (with sombre horn flourishes) written from the perspective of Bobby Clarke, a Canadian who claims to have captured a video of an alleged Bigfoot sighting in 2005.
But “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure” is no doubt Reunion Tour’s centrepiece, a continuation of Reconstruction Site’s “Plea From a Cat Named Virtute” that sees its titular narrator – yes, an actual cat – no longer as a house cat, but as a stray. “Virtute...” is much starker than its predecessor; a slow-burning, slow-building ballad set to sparse instrumentation and measured brush drums. Its ultimate tragedy, amidst frostbite and run-ins with other strays, is Virtute’s realization that he no longer remembers his name – or, as he knows it, “the sound that you found for me” – and his nostalgic remembrance of domesticity (“Let you brush my matted fur / How I’d knead into your chest while you were sleeping / Shallow breathing made me purr”). And it all builds to a beautifully crafted, intricately duelling guitar solo. There’s no denying that the premise is hokey, and I can’t think of many bands that could pull off anything like it without looking ridiculous. But that’s because most bands would do it with a smirk, whereas the Weakerthans play it with the perfect (that is, total) amount of sincerity.
They do the same with “Elegy for Gump Worsley,” a spoken-word tribute to the NHL goaltender – one of the very last to forego a mask – set to hypnotically plucked banjos, that would sound ridiculous coming from a group that wasn’t acutely aware of Worsley’s fingerprints on the sport of hockey and the Canadian identity. This is a bold statement, considering that Gump – short, shaped like a pear, and not much of an athlete – often goes unremembered as one of the game’s elite goaltenders. But his ballsy approach to the game – irrespective of his fat gut – is emblematic of how Canadian culture approaches its national game. In America, they say that every child can one day grow up to become president of the United States. Gump Worsley is symbolic of a Canadian equivalent to that egalitarian ideal; that, if you work hard enough, you too can play professional hockey. Samson says himself in the song, “‘I’m strictly a whisky man’ is one of the sticks he taped up and gave to a nation of pudgy boys.”
The portrait of Worsley is remarkable for its depth – especially given the song’s sub-three minute length – and is alternately sad, sweet, and hilarious (my vote for most memorable lyric of 2007: “Favourites from Plimpton’s list of objects thrown by Rangers fans: soup cans, persimmon, eggs, a folding chair, and a dead rabbit”). Samson both reinforces and undercuts the Worsley mythos, juxtaposing his on-ice fearlessness (“He swore he was never afraid of the puck / We believe him”) with his off-ice fear of flying (“The nervous breakdown of '68 and '69 after pant-crap flights from L.A. / The shrink told me to change occupations”). Cokemachineglow’s Jessica Faulds was critical of “Elegy’s” ‘face-as-mask’ metaphor, writing, “Okay, it’s a goalie’s mask, but I don’t feel so bad now for comparing love with a flame.” But she misses the point, primarily because the lyric in question (“If anyone asks, the inscription should read ‘My face was my mask’”) is actually a quote lifted verbatim from Worsley. And what she really failed to realize is that this supposedly “lazy metaphor,” quoted or not, is less of a metaphor than it is – as I mentioned previously – an encapsulation of a uniquely Canadian spirit, relevant to hockey and to life in general. “Elegy for Gump Worsley” seems to be a divisive entry in the Weakerthans’ songbook, perhaps because of its hookless, spoken-word nature. But to me, this kind of incisive character study – one that may be more perceptive than full-length biographies – epitomizes the kind of intellectual curiosity that defines the Weakerthans. And while some have criticized their musical accompaniment, I can’t think of a more perfect way to beautifully frame this powerful elegy.
I’ll readily admit that I am – for all intents and purposes – a Weakerthans fan-boy. And it might seem as though I’m fawning over Samson and his collaborators. That makes convincing readers that Reunion Tour (or any Weakerthans album) is worthwhile a challenging proposition. But I think that there’s a compelling argument to be made for why Reunion Tour – and the band – haven’t gotten the due that they deserve. It’s not as grand as its predecessor, but Reunion Tour is still a wonderful album, and certainly one of the best of 2007. The problem, if there is one, is an audience of Gump Worsleys, of Pitchfork-orientated naysayers who have hardened their faces and donned their masks to ironically deride a form of sincerity that would force them to confront their own insecurities.
And while I may sound bitter about all of this, I assure you that I’m mostly not. I’m just advocating – as objectively as I can – on behalf of an album (and moreover, a band) that is (here it comes) really, really good.
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