Album Review: The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour

Reunion Tour is The Weakerthans'' fourth full length studio album.

Canadian indie-rock quartet The Weakerthans are not, like many bands today, an every other year (or every year in some cases) record factory. They take their time crafting their songs, letting life inspire them before putting pen to paper or fingers to strings. As such the group's discography flows like a biography with each album transporting the listener to a different, distinct stage of life and state of mind.

Fallow, the band's 1997 debut, comes from a place of restless dissatisfaction with life thus far, steeped in a familiar fondness but also an overwhelming urge for escape. Listening in, we feel the stagnation and the irrepressible need for some kind – any kind – of change. With 2000's Left and Leaving we've made our decision to cast off from our moorings in search of our future but before we leave we must come to terms with parting from everything – the good and the bad – that has shaped us. The departure is bittersweet and poignant as the aching wanderlust has been joined by a strange, previously unthinkable, yet currently unmistakable sense of loss. Through Reconstruction Site in 2003 we learn that our relocation has not gone well, though through it all we retain an optimism and an undercurrent of hope. Grabbing hold of these tiny slivers of possibility we once more begin to dream.

In this narrative one might expect The Weakerthans' fourth full length, Reunion Tour, to be a triumphant pop-filled masterpiece detailing success at long last with a well-earned measure of happiness and peace. If only. Life, as we learn quickly, is rarely that simple. Told through the eyes of several different narrators at disparate points in their lives, we ultimately we see that the old adage is true: once you leave you can never really go home again.

The easygoing, deceptively poppy instrumentations of opener "Civil Twilight" belie the more thoughtful worries of the song as a bus route starts out in the humdrum concerns of the working world and routinely turns into slightly melancholy remembering.

This part of the day bewilders me,
streets slow down and ice over.
Dusk comes on and I struggle
to stop to stop, to stop thinking of you.

"Hymn for the Medical Oddity" is a mournful bout of nostalgia and the first hints we get that what used to be home is now just a place we used to live.

And I'll drive around
and wait for it.
Follow familiar roads
emptied of every memory
under a sheet of silence and unmarked snow.

If any band has mastered and distilled the auditory equivalent of contemplation it is the Weakerthans and this song proves it once again.

By the fourth track we are well on our way to feeling the unease of returning to where we were, geographically, in 1997 but while remaining light years (and three albums) removed mentally and emotionally. The song, "Virtue the Cat Explains Her Departure" is told from the perspective of the same Virtue the Cat that pleaded with us on Reconstruction Site to break out of our funk and realize our own strength and inspiration. This time around, however, her words are not nearly as uplifting as the last, reflected in the slow, tender, wistful pacing of the music. Her story mirrors ours as she tells of how the outside world caught her attention and wouldn't let go. She left to explore the vastness of the outdoors but when she finds that there is darkness behind the bright lights she remembers her life inside our house and longs to come home. Tragically, she can't quite remember the way back. She tells her tale in front of lilting, sparse music that slowly builds to a larger, chorusing climax. The song nails the theme and the feeling of the album and perfectly channels the bewildered nature of finding something completely alien where there used to be something intimately familiar.

The mellow "Sun in an Empty Room" is a further exercise in relating a heartfelt, emotional story through a light and airy song. Through images of packing up and moving out the band examines side by side the hectic new life we've made for ourselves and the rose-colored longing for the imperfect yet well-traveled past we left behind. It's a warm, inviting song bordering on pop and providing the perfect segue way into the most accessible song on the album, "Night Windows."

Released before the album itself, "Night Windows" succeeds as the easiest song to get right into through strong, prominent bass and drums accompanied by restrained, almost decorative flourishes of guitar picking. The rhythm section drives this song (well, that and John K. Samson's voice as always) though the real payoff comes courtesy of the chorus-like vocals and overlapping vocal harmonies towards the end. Always able to craft music and lyrics that fit perfectly together, the song follows a sort of spiral that seems to repeat but each recurrence is different than the last. Much like the album, again, each time we come around expecting something recognizable we are haunted by the memories of what has been and unsure of where things will someday be.

In the stick count for the song with knowing you're gone,
glancing up at where you lived when you lived here
I see you suddenly alive and nearly smiling.
Stop and hold my breath and watch the way we used to be

The full moon makes our faces shine like over-ironed polyester
then disappears behind the clouds
and leaves me under empty rows of night windows

We chase down dreams and are ridiculed for it in "Bigfoot", stand in the shoes of a band forever on the road in "Reunion Tour" and finally end up right around where we started in "Utilities". Unsure how to move forward, and now knowing that we cannot go back we are confused, isolated and once again, as we were when this started ten years ago, searching for meaning.

Seems the most I have to offer
doesn't offer much.
Make it something somebody could use.
Make this something somebody could use.

Many different voices speak on this record but like all Weakerthans albums they serve to speak not only for themselves but for the bits of them in all of us. In the end Reunion Tour is everything we've come to expect from the band that has consistently revealed new ways of experiencing some of the most basic and universal aspects of living. Simple pieces beautifully blended to create a dazzlingly real snapshot of humanity. At times pop, at times ballad; alternately sparse or orchestral; always elegant and instantly classic.

Band: The Weakerthans
Album: Reunion Tour
Label: Epitaph/Anti
Release Date: 9/25/07

Originally posted to NewYorkCool

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