The Weakerthans -- Reunion Tour

The Weakerthans have been around for ten years. Ten years is a long time, especially for a band that deals in such emotional terms - a man can only sing about being sad for so long before he becomes a caricature of his former self. Reinvention, however slight, is necessary.

The strange part of it is, The Weakerthans' existence only starts mattering when you hit high school. For some people, The Weakerthans have been around for a decade. For some, it is four years. This is not up for the band to decide. Just whenever some kid gets lonely and listens to Left & Leaving for the first time.

I am no longer in high school. Accordingly, there is a lot of music I obsessed over during those years that hasn't aged so well. Some of it hasn't gotten worse at all - because now that I look back, it was just bad to begin with. Often those first records from a few years ago were followed up with lesser and lesser works that have tainted the artists' legacy. When I heard The Weakerthans were coming out with a new album now seven years after L&L, I had all the reasons to expect mediocrity. Usually, once people hit about 35, they can't be the same genius creator any more. Pinker says that in How the Mind Works. No one should be ashamed. It just happens.

So I came into my first listen of The Weakerthans new album, Reunion Tour with lowered expectations. And a few songs in, there was nothing to make me think otherwise. John K. Samson is still writing tight songs - you can tell that if all his songs were stripped down to bare bones, these would be indistinguishable from what we all love about the last two records. "Civil Twilight," the opener, is lyrically solid, with the same character traits that Samson specializes in. But the track really suffers from some tired instrument work. Drums do nothing special. The synth lines are almost at center stage, and they are not memorable even after multiple listens. Most of all, the guitars are nondescript and their tones are bordering on cheesy. "Hymn of the Medical Oddity" features clumsy counterpoint in the guitar line and more boring synth work. It ends up being one of the weaker songs on the album. "Relative Surplus Value" is a rocker that follows suit - not bad, not good. Middle of the road pretty much sums it up. The first three song would have been fine as b-sides to the first two records, but the opener is the only one that might even deserve to be on a full length, and in a perfect world it wouldn't be an opener.

But then "Tournament of Hearts" comes up. I was really ready to write Reunion Tour off before this one came on, but I like it. Samson's lyrics work on the subject of the isolation in the middle of a crowd - the man at the end of the bar. And I think it might be a song about the sport of curling too. The fifth song on the record is a return for the cat named Virtute from the previous record, but the song a return to the first three - not bad, not good, not really much of anything. In "Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure," the end could be effective, but the guitars don't really do anything. There is no build. This Virtute song will differ from the previous one on Reconstruction Site in that it will not be the talked about song on the album. If anyone does end up discussing it, it will be because it doesn't deliver.

Any album that is boring five songs in is generally boring from there out. Front loading is a much better idea than putting the best stuff on the back end. But the band then throws a curve into the mix with the sixth song, "Elegy for Gump Worsley." The song, a spoken word passage about the former pro hockey goalie that passed in January 2007, is more like a song from the Books, with spoken word, banjo, acoustic loops, horns, and a lack of drums. The final line, "If anyone asks/the inscription should read/my face was my mask." works well. The song is actually really good. And then, it leads straight into the record's best song.

"Sun in an Empty Room" is the title of both the seventh song on Reunion Tour and a 1963 painting by artist Edward Hopper. I would like to be able to talk extensively about this painting, but I don't know shit about art because Art History wasn't one of the AP courses offered at my high school. However, my high school did possess The Weakerthans, as most probably have in the past few years. Samson does a great job of representing a true emptiness of both self and surrounding in the lyrics. The final chorus of 'Take eight minutes and divide/sun in an empty room/by ninety million lonely lives/sun in an empty room/watch the shadow cross the floor/sun in an empty room/we don't live here any more/sun in an empty room' hits home. This isn't just a sad song. It is a lonely one. I really hope the Hopper painting gets put somewhere in the album art just for good measure. The pairing of two medias is something that should happen more often.

"Night Windows" is a classic L&L-esque song with imaginative percussion as well as guitar lines. Check out the line 'The full moon makes our faces shine/like over ironed polyester.' The more I listen to it, I feel like this song would have made a great opener and is definitely front of album material. "Bigfoot" brings in high-plucked guitar with horns and is reminiscent of DCFC's opener for The Photo Album. After that, the title track finally brings in some synth parts that fare better than the ones from earlier in the album. Multiple drum tracks and higher-level instrumentation help this one bring to mind the phenomenal production on Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The final song on the album, "Utilities," brings in swirling electronics, horns and woodwinds with the usual Weakerthans instruments to open up into a country-tinged waltz with Samson singing 'make me something somebody can use.' The song is great ender to the second half of the album that finishes so strongly in comparison to the first half.

Looking at it, Reunion Tour doesn't suffer from songwriting, just an awful job of sequencing. This album would have made the best EP we'd have ever seen if they had cut it down to a handful of songs, probably too good for just an EP. The record is good, but what is sad is it could have been much better. I'd love to see these songs live - I'm sure some of the songs on the front half would be much better afterwards. God, I feel like I'm 17 again.