Hurrying hard

The Weakerthans, from left: Greg Smith, Jason Tait, John K. Samson and Stephen Carroll. (Epitaph Records)

Breaking a four-year silence, Winnipeg’s The Weakerthans return this week with Reunion Tour, a collection of quietly intelligent lyrics, catchy hooks and a rink-full of hockey and curling metaphors.

Since Fallow, their 1997 debut CD, the band has usually been described in a series of searching hyphenates (punk-folk, power-pop-indie, post-punk). Reunion Tour’s sound is confident and consolidated, but it isn’t any easier to sum up. Even the infinitely detailed classification systems of college radio might have a hard time placing a talking-song tribute to one of the last NHL goalies to go maskless (Elegy for Gump Worsley) or the hummable Tournament of Hearts, in which a man’s romantic failure is expressed through images of the “roaring game.”

(Perhaps realizing that hurry-hard curling references could cause confusion among the band’s considerable American audience, the band has released a tongue-in-cheek webisode on YouTube. In it, songwriter and singer John K. Samson solemnly informs the audience that all Canadians learn to curl by age three or four – “sometimes earlier, really” – and that “the average Canadian will spend four nights a week curling.” )

“We’re infatuated with curling lore,” says guitarist Stephen Carroll, in a phone interview with CBCNews.ca. And sure, the sport works beautifully as a sideways statement of regional pride or a quirky metaphor for one man’s “hack-weight” love landing somewhere between fear and regret. But curling isn’t just a metaphor for The Weakerthans, who tend to be walk-the-walk sort of guys. Carroll played on his dad’s team last winter, and Samson was a spare.

“John knows his way around a sheet,” Carroll confirms. In fact, Samson was coached as a teenager by world champion Connie Laliberte. “In what other sport would you have that kind of accessibility?” marvels Carroll. “Our curling rink just down the street is filled with world championship trophies, Canadian championship titles. You walk in off the street and there they are. There’s so much unassuming prestige.”

“Unassuming prestige” isn’t a bad phrase for the band, which has built up an enviable critical rep and a passionate following while maintaining a modest, prairie-boy profile. Samson and Carroll currently make their homes in Winnipeg, while drummer Jason Tait and bass player Greg Smith live in Toronto. Despite the geographic divide, Carroll thinks The Weakerthans are fundamentally a Winnipeg band. “I think our soul is based in Winnipeg. It’s the city that influences the writing of the songs the most.”

(Indoor Recess/FAB)

Carroll calls Reunion Tour “a collection of songs and stories.” Samson’s long-gestating lyrics have been crafted into a series of first-person narratives. Recurring Weakerthans themes – the failure of communication, the slow, ebbing loss of love, the cruelties of capitalism – emerge through the imagined lives of a heartsick Winnipeg Transit bus driver, a dotcom hotshot just about to crash, and a northern Manitoba man whose Bigfoot sighting invites a town’s disbelief and scorn. Hymn of the Medical Oddity is an oblique rendering of the tragic biography of David Reimer, whose life was blighted by a wrong-headed gender-reassignment experiment performed when he was a child.

Another central character is the city of Winnipeg. Reunion Tour references potholes and plant closures, wintry streets and December twilights hunkering down at four in the afternoon. As with Guy Maddin’s recent TIFF hit My Winnipeg, feelings for the Peg are affectionate, agonized and inescapable, all at once.

Samson has been called rock’s poet laureate, and his literary credentials run deep. Along with his day job at Arbeiter Ring, a not-for-profit publishing collective, he’s also the reigning king of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads contest, winning in 2006 with his advocacy of the book A Complicated Kindness and then acing the 2007 tournament-of-champions round with Lullabies for Little Criminals. (He beat out Barenaked Ladies’ Steven Page and Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, incidentally.)

In his music, Samson is smart without being a know-it-all, keenly political but never preachy. His love songs possess a worn-out romanticism. He also has a talent for storytelling without folksiness. Take Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure, which updates the feline narrative first seen on 2003’s Reconstruction Site. Is there anything more potentially precious than a song told from the point of view of a cat with a Latin name? But Samson pulls it off. This is cat consciousness by way of a Raymond Carver story: the words are pared down and implacable, not a bit cuddly. (“When winter took the tips of my ears, I found this noisy home full of pigeons and places to hide.”)

Two other songs, Night Windows and Sun in an Empty Room, reference the work of Edward Hopper, finding verbal equivalents for the American painter’s vision of urban alienation, haunted empty spaces and strained male-female relations.

The Weakerthans might have a hard time getting away with such brainiac lyrics if they didn’t have an infectious sound. “We always just think of ourselves as a rock ’n’ roll band,” says Carroll. “You know, ballads, up-tempo songs, guitar solos.” There are plenty of those on Reunion Tour, but there’s also a horn section on a few cuts, along with some ambient, electronic noise. “I don’t know how to quantify the audio aspects of the record,” Carroll admits. “I think it’s imbued with the spirit of the place in which it was created.”

Reunion Tour was recorded during a frigid March, in a studio built on top of a factory on Winnipeg’s edge. The band would arrive after the factory workers had gone home, play through the night and then head out to cold cars in the pre-dawn darkness. “You can sort of hear that,” Carroll says. “It does sound a little angular.”

On Sept. 25, the band dives back into a rigorous concert schedule and “the daily prayers of set-lists” mentioned in the song Reunion Tour. “John wrote that song thinking about all those classic mid-’80s hard rock bands that were getting together and going from touring arenas to touring tiny clubs,” states Carroll. “It’s about doing what you do regardless of what your circumstances are.”

For The Weakerthans, doing what they do means 54 concerts in North America and Europe in almost as many days. Looks like the curling season is on hold. 

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg-based writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.