C&L's Late Night Music Club with The Weakerthans
I am an undying champion of Winnipeg, Manitoba's Weakerthans. There are enough current songwriters capable of spinning complete yarns about colorful, defined characters in 4-minute pop structures to count on one hand, and John K. Samson gets the pointer finger.
The band's most recent effort, Reunion Tour, is a dense pack of understated gems, mostly about characters dealing with slow and undramatic disappointment, but with genuine humor and warmth in place of the judgment and pity that usually plagues the form. Civil Twilight is a bouncy rock tune sung from the perspective of a Winnipeg bus driver reflecting on a long past divorce. Bigfoot, based on the true story of a man in Northern Canada who became the subject of ridicule tourism for a run-in with the Sasquatch which, ridiculous or not, truly terrified him. "Sun In An Empty Room" is the standout among standouts in the collection.
PS Our sister site Newstalgia has something loud for Labor Day: Humble Pie from 1973.
| Reunion Tour | |
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Artist: The Weakerthans
Price: $8.93
(As of 02/09/12 03:13 pm details)
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I really like this band.
The Weakerthans are awesome. I've been a fan for years. Samson does poignant like nobody's business. Also, they have the best song about curling ever written, "Tournament of Hearts." BTW, "Sun in an Empty Room," like a couple of other of their songs, is inspired by the painter Edward Hopper. It's one of his last paintings, finished in 1963, when he was 81. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/i...
also there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUyQoHVgHu8
City & Colour
"Know the things we need to say
And said already anyways
By parallelograms of light
On walls that we repainted white."
SUN IN AN EMPTY ROOM.
Thanks. Cool and profound.
Done and Done... ish.
Those are all great choices, but anyone who has lived in Winnipeg (or anywhere on the Canadian prairies) would nominate "Tournament of Hearts" as the most pun-filled, fun-filled, but ultimately sad song on the album. It is absolutely brilliant.
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