Anyone heard the new Weakerthans?

[Duck-Billed Catechist]

Yes? No? Thoughts?

[the carlos]

I've heard a few tracks. I've liked the new tracks. I really liked "Civil Twilight". Lindsey has loved the new tracks. Looking forward to the album coming out. We are seeing them in a couple weeks. We've been waiting to see them since 2000 so we are both pretty psyched.

[tongue-tied lightning]

my first time hearing the band.

 

they did grow on me

[Duck-Billed Catechist]

Reconstruction Site was really good. It was big around these parts back in the day.

[thejokeexplained]

Thanks a lot man... this thread just cost me 30 bucks in vinyl after checking some tracks out on their web page!

[Kalle]

The Weakerthans are a fine Canadian band the new record is good but it's really no different for them.

[entropy]

...honestly?

 

The Tom-Waits-esque banjo poetry track, the full orchestral swirls, the new singing style, the new guitar tones and the fuller, 'complete band' not just 'a backing band for john samson' thing didn't stand out to you?

[bobfrombob]

Dreamin

[Welsh Rich]

It's great... they're even touring the UK at the end of the year!

[lizish]

Apropos of nothing, but there's a new Guy Madden film out called My Winnipeg:

 

 

He assumes he was held in place by the same mysterious forces that keep so many Winnipeggers from leaving: Maybe it's even had something to do with the first-nations legend referred to in the film, about magnetic underground rivers that meet below the Red and the Assiniboine - the forks beneath the forks. "I'd like to think it's some kind of parapsychically powerful location," he says. "Since Winnipeg has the harshest climate of any city over 100,000, and nobody's leaving, there must be a pretty powerful attraction keeping us here." Or, he offers, maybe it's just laziness and a lack of imagination.

 

I would imagine Sampson being effected by the same magnetic forces.

 

more.. and I can't wait to see the film.

 

It's at this point that Maddin's sense of wonder and playfulness gives way to anger at what he sees as a city bent on mediocrity. " 'What if?' Thinking about the city made me consider that phrase a lot. What if Winnipeg hadn't made 100 consecutive bad city planning decisions?" he asks.

 

His biggest gripe along those lines involves the demise of the old Winnipeg Arena, where Maddin's father spent most of his time behind the bench of the Winnipeg Maroons. After his father's death in 1970 - which Maddin blames on the decision to cancel the Winnipeg-based national hockey team - the arena came to represent, to the son, his father's fading masculine world. First the NHL's Jets left because they couldn't sell enough luxury boxes. Then Eaton's went bankrupt, and city council decided to tear down the old Eaton's building on Portage Avenue and put a new arena in its place.

 

"Only a few protesters from the flaky arts community linked arms around the building. But it was a lot bigger than the Wolseley elm, and they couldn't make it all the way around," he says.

 

Maddin watched as the old arena was torn to pieces. Just before the building came down, he snuck in and videotaped himself: the last man to pee in a massive trench urinal that ran along the walls of the arena men's room. "I always felt I loved the arena more than anybody else anyway, so to take the last pee in it was like the Governor-General made a decree," he says. "People who talk about the arena talk about the trough all the time. It sort of binds Winnipeggers together, so I feel pretty special about it."

 

from

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...pageRequested=1

 

there really is a pretty cool arts community there. Madden, Sampson, Fellows, Romi Mayes, Jason Tait, Leanne Zacharias....

 

It is certainly One Great City!

 

And up above us all leaning into the sky

Our golden business boy will watch the north end die

And sing 'I love love this town'

Then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim

"I hate Winnipeg"

[petemoss]

I love the new cd, it is pretty sweet.

Of course I love all of their stuff.

Left and Leaving was a kick to the head the first time i heard it, so awesome.

[bsr8j]

Thank God for Paste Magazine. Part of the reason I got a subscription to the magazine was because of the music sampler that comes with each issue. (And how could I pass up on a magazine that writes about Wilco, The Drive-By Truckers, and other bands I love? Why do I even still bother getting Rolling Stone?) The latest CD had "Civil Twilight" on it, thus introducing me to The Weakerthans. I've been trying to find the new album in my area, but alas had to just order it online. I really dig it and will be checking out their other stuff.

[ction]

I liked the songs John sang with Propagandhi. I did not like what I heard in my limited exposure to the Weakerthans.

[aricandover]

I've never heard the old Weakerthans.

[bsr8j]

I've never heard the old Weakerthans.

 

*rim shot*

[GtrPlyr]

I remember seeing these guys many years ago in Toronto on a bill with Ron Hawkins and the Rusty Nails, and Jim Bryson. I loved them (and Jim) so much that I ended up picking up "Left and Leaving" and the first Bryson CD after the show. I'm still a fan of both...

 

Anyhow, the new one has really grown on me with successive listens. I can't help but smile every time I hear those curling metaphors used to describe the narrators failings in life and love in "Tournament of Hearts." Even the spoken word tribute to Gump Worsley isn't without it's charms. Like other Weakerthans records, this one is full of heartfelt music and the wonderfully insightful lyrics of John Samson (one of the best lyricists in modern music today for my money.)

[tugmoose]

If you're seein' 'em on their current tour, don't miss opener The Last Town Chorus.

 

October

24 Wed: Detroit, MI - Magic Stick

25 Thu: Chicago, IL - The Metro AA

26 Fri: Cleveland, OH - Grog Shop AA

27 Sat: Pittsburgh, PA - Mr. Smalls Theatre AA

28 Sun: Washington, DC - 9:30 Club AA

29 Mon: Philadelphia, PA - Trocadero Theatre AA

30 Tue: New York, NY - Webster Hall 16+

 

November

01 Thu: Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club 18+

[lizish]

I've never heard the old Weakerthans.

 

You must be the laziest person ever.

 

 

 

Good article from the Epitaph website:

 

MONDAY OCTOBER 8, 2007

The Weakerthans: From the Margins

 

"I think people in small towns are taken advantage of by the culture in general, by the mainstream and used as props for jokes," fumes Weakerthans front man John K. Samson. "That really makes me kind of angry. They're taken advantage of in a lot of different ways. They're seen as not as aware or not as intelligent, when, in fact, they are. That's always been a theme; the unjustness of people living in a place where the culture thinks doesn't really exist. Where people are made to feel like their lives don't matter."

 

Samson knows all about living under cultural marginalization -- possibly a little too well. As a Canadian artist, he's a sitting target for that crass and all-too-common brand Yankee jingoist that treats Canada as a punch line more than a neighbor. His hometown, Winnipeg, a modest berg of a little more than half a million that sits on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, isn't the sort of hub of commerce and activity as any of the continent's big cities, so he's accustomed, if not exactly comfortable, with snobbish metropolitan attitudes toward his community. Winnipeg's geographic isolation -- it's a good several-hour truck to its nearest metro sprawl, Toronto -- only accentuates that. And, last, but certainly not least, coming up from the punk and do-it-yourself underground, Samson cut his musical teeth living on the pop-cultural fringe. Anyone who champions the intellectual and cultural superiority of the city and the mainstream over the towns and underground is going to write him off as a punk-rock hayseed, a rube from a second-tier city with nothing to tell us.

 

And he shows them all up within a few minutes of The Weakerthans' latest effort, Reunion Tour (Anti-). Joining longtime collaborators Stephen Carroll, bassist Greg Smith and drummer Jason Tait, Samson brings the band out of a four-year recording slump with a grand return to the act's concise, literate blend of folk, pop and punk spirit. Samson couples a poet's eye for imagery and ear for a great turn of phrase with offbeat subject matter and a generously sympathetic take on his subjects. He tackles a breadth of subjects, some drawn purely out of Samson's imagination (a disgruntled pet in "Virtue the Cat Explains Her Departure"), some idealized characters from his Winnipeg home town (a bus driver in "Civil Twilight"), other flesh-and-blood Winnipeggers ("Hymn for the Medical Oddity" gently gives a glimpse into the life of David Reimer, born male but raised female as an experiment, and "Bigfoot!" chronicles the life of Bobby Clarke, who became the whipping boy for the media's jokes after going public with a sasquatch sighting). Samson even coaxes a couple tunes out of those paintings by Edward Hopper where loneliness is an almost tangible presence on the canvas ("Sun in an Empty Room" and "Night Windows").

 

Loneliness is tantamount to The Weakerthans' music, as most scribes talking about the band seem compelled to point out, and loneliness once again permeates Reunion Tour. What most people miss is that Samson's brand of lonesome songwriting isn't your run-of-the-mill lonely-hearts-club pop. Instead of the "home alone on a Saturday night" flavor, the "confused about the world" flavor, the "my loved one doesn't even understand me" flavor or any one of a million other brands of winsome self-pity, Samson channels a type of lonesome you'll get reading in silence in a bustling library, pulled over on a small highway in the middle of the plains or, presumably, walking on the moon; there's the feeling of solitude and melancholy, but, strangely, The Weakerthans' loneliest moments are somehow comforting, trading hopelessness for a delicate contentment that, as a rule stands crumbling.

 

For the past decade, Samson stocked his world with characters of his own devising, whipping up first-person narratives about everyone from grassroots activists and street kids to corporate types tussled by market forces way out of their control. If the band's catalog of characters represents Samson's first-person fiction, Reunion Tour marks his first stab at creative nonfiction. Adopting a handful of subjects drawn from real-life tragedies, Samson lays out a tableau loosely based on their stories, be it an encounter with parazoology or the lasting affects of a crude psychological experiment, and, after all these years, lets the world of The Weakerthans intersect with the real world.

 

Tragedies such as Reimer's unwitting role in unethical gender-role experiments or Clarke's meltdown after watching himself turned into a living joke by the media lend themselves to a storyteller's pen. They are, after all, tragedies, the mightiest form of literature. For Samson, though, handling his real-life inspirations with the same dignity that he grants his characters was paramount. His songs are less about further exploiting those much-downtrodden folks than giving them a bit of much-deserved sympathy and dignity.

 

Weakerthans - From the Margins"I think that's the most dangerous aspect of the writing process for me, was writing about these people and trying not to take advantage of them," Samson explains. "All of them have these great narratives that really lent themselves to be written about. What I tried to do, I tried to take it down to the really smallest level I could think of. In all the songs, it's just a small snapshot of a small corner of their lives in a way. I was hoping that could be extrapolated somehow and it could still be respectful and they could still have their stories which are theirs that could be told outside of those songs."

 

To his credit, Samson handles his real-world inspirations with enough care to preserve their dignity, at least within the world of song. Of course, he's had a lot of practice wielding a lyricist's pen before he could arrive at that point. He cut his teeth as bass player for the rabble-rousing Propagandhi until he bowed out to focus on his literary efforts. After a stretch of downtime, the call of the stage proved too hard to resist, but the immersion in writing and a startup publishing company drastically altered Samson's output, as he traded in three-chord sloganeering in for a more reflective, folk-based sound. Hooking up with Tait and bassist John Sutton, he cut Fallow, whose self-aware and worldly songwriting quickly found a home on G7 Welcoming Committee, the same collective responsible for Propagandhi's Canadian releases. Carroll joined shortly after, and was on board for 2000's Reconstruction Site, where his skills with a six-string fleshed out The Weakerthans' sound, expanding the folk-pop hybrid to be a suitable counterpart to Samson's formidable lyricism. The band's rounded sound, as well as a touring ethic that kept it seemingly endlessly bopping between tiny clubs, built up enough of a following to attract the attention of Sub City. For 2003's Reconstruction Site, The Weakerthans graduated from the G7/Hopeless contracts to Epitaph's prestige imprint, Anti- Records.

 

Although The Weakerthans' studio output slowed to a trickle over recent years, Reunion Tour isn't the back-to-work release its title might have you believe. The band never really went away (a glance at its tour log of the past several years bears that out), but got locked into a cycle where craftsmanship trumped haste, where Samson's library research and the band's careful reworking of its arrangements was diligently ticking away in the background. If it looked as if The Weakerthans were taking it easy over the past four years, it's only because your outsider's perspective's skewed your view of band operations to depend on album-release milestones and not the sweat and effort of songwriting.

 

Truth be told, though, it wasn't all practice-room development and lyric writing -- The Weakerthans aren't about to let their songwriting personas overshadow their personal lives: Half the band lives in Toronto, a 20-hour drive from its base of operations in Winnipeg, and all of the band, like any well rounded thirtysomething, has a personal life to attend to. Lives can't be put into storage for marathon tours and weeks-long songwriting binges.

 

"I was actually really enjoying how long it was taking," Samson says. "We were taking a long time with the songs and walking around with them in our heads. I just enjoyed that. It did take a little longer than it should have, I guess. We had a lot going on in our lives. Our lives at home are always more important than our lives in the band. I think that's a good thing.

 

Weakerthans - From the Margins"I guess that anyone who travels for their work, it can be a real strain on your home life. You have to really work hard and make that balance level out. It's still really difficult to be on tour a lot. I think we've figured out how to do it. We're all in our mid-30s now. We all have really settled home lives. We've figured out how to do it."

 

After meticulously putting together the songs for Reunion Tour, The Weakerthans just needed to find a way to put them to tape perfectly. They didn't have to search too far to make it happen: Linking up with longtime sound man Cam Loeppky and producer Ian Blurton, the band entered a live room perched above a factory floor, and, during the plant's closed-down swing- and night-shifts, took to the shop floor to play, record and simply indulge in the massive, open spaces that a deserted factory provides.

 

Sure, it's trendy these days in the recording world to pack up recording gear, head off to a rented cathedral, a disused butcher's shop or a backwoods cabin, but The Weakerthans' factory-floor sessions were more than just a mobile-studio gimmick. The setting, with its line workers gone and the din of industrial noises shut down for the evening, was the embodiment of the themes of isolation and the lonely arrangements that's the band's calling card. It's hard to listen to Reunion Tour without picturing the band playing its songs in a sleeping factory in a tiny prairie town surrounded by miles of Manitoba's prairie -- a mood that's partially a product of the album's unusual genesis.

 

"It really affected the mood of the record," Samson says. "I was really happy with that. A lot of the songs lent themselves to that setting, a factory. It was cool to have people working during the day, and then we would come in and work during the night. It felt like a place where work was done. That's always helpful. I like that feeling of a place that contains people working. I wrote quite a bit of the lyrics in the Winnipeg library, actually. It's the same kind of place. It's the kind of place where you feel the energy of people working all around you and I think it's a really productive feeling."

 

It also mirrors the forlorn chronicles of anomie in The Weakerthans' songs. To say it's poetic isn't just a pun on the band's status as alpha dog of the literary-rock pack, either; There's something romantic about the notion of our four troubadours plucking their hearts out amid the half-constructed cases for musical instruments and computers their adoptive home churns out during the workday, weaving tales of lonesome figures and detestable goons through the frigid nights of a Manitoba winter. If a setting creates a vibe that bleeds through onto the record, The Weakerthans couldn't have found a better place to record Reunion Tour.

 

And Samson is the man to give voice to those stories of the marginalized and disaffected, primarily because he's of their ranks. A pop-cultural castaway, playing music too eccentric for the mainstream and, largely, too quirky for the scene-obsessed underground. He's a man that the cultural gatekeepers don't want you to think about, and instead turn your attention to the beautiful people in New York and Los Angeles. It's a creepy feeling once you realize your hometown's so far off the cultural radar you might as well be dead.

 

"I get that feeling everywhere," he admits. "I think Winnipeg for me stands in for every city and every community. I think it's true that you can find that sense of dislocation or the feeling that people don't have real self worth anywhere you go, because I think that our culture kind of encourages that. If you're not on T.V., your life is kind of meaningless. I think Winnipeg is especially like that."

 

There's an option, though, buried deep in The Weakerthans' songs. You probably don't live in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, but, as Reunion Tour's tiny slices of life outside mainstream culture's golden mean show, there's still a lot of life left to live -- even if it's done with the quiet dignity of the damned and downtrodden that line The Weakerthans' world.

 

by Matt Schild

Aversion.com

[Welsh Rich]

REally like the old album... even if I did make the mistake of calling them American in a news item... I was half asleep, ok?!?!

[lizish]

REally like the old album... even if I did make the mistake of calling them American in a news item... I was half asleep, ok?!?!

 

Tee hee.

 

I'm following the Blog and it is very good. You guys should be proud.

[Welsh Rich]

Thank you!

[aricandover]

You must be the laziest person ever.

 

nah, I'm pretty active.

[LouieB]

I am only two inches ahead of aricandover..I have heard of them, but that is about all.

 

Also I can verify that he isn't at ALL lazy.......

 

LouieB

[bobfrombob]

From The Stranger via Chromewaves, Craig Finn talks of great lyricists:

 

You're one of my favorite lyricists. Who are some of yours?

 

John Samson from the Weakerthans

[lizish]

also nicked from chromewaves but with an AOL Canada source. In this one Samson talks books and poetry.

 

Didn't know that Samson loved 'in the skin of the lion' almost as much as I do.

 

http://music.aol.ca/article/the-weakerthans/223/

 

 

The Weakerthans Stay Strong and Free

By Michael Barclay

The Weakerthans

Epitaph/Anti

 

Only a Canadian band would ever write a punk rock song about curling. But the preferred pastime of small-town retirees, which is the setting for "Tournament of Hearts" off the new Weakerthans album 'Reunion Tour,' is not the only Canadian concern of bandleader John K. Samson.

 

Elsewhere on the record, he sings about a man who spots a sasquatch. Another is about a bus driver who passes his time reciting names of Canadian provinces. There's a spoken-word piece about legendary NHL goalie Gump Worsley. "Hymn for a Medical Oddity" is written from the perspective of Winnipeg's David Reimer, who underwent an involuntary sex change operation at birth. And though Samson denies it, the lyrics to "Sun in an Empty Room" may well be a metaphor for the type of branch plant economy that defines Canada in 2007.

More Music Features

The Weakerthans Stay Strong and Free Ghislain Poirier and the rise of "global ghettotech" Ani DiFranco: Still Righteous After All These Years Love and a Buck 65

 

It's obvious Samson has an eye for some of the more unusual corners of the Canadian psyche. But he's extremely hesitant to locate these tales inside any sort of national identity