Four years after releasing their best album, the Weakerthans enjoy the liberty of having nothing to prove and then going ahead and proving it anyway. The band goes for melodically sympathetic rock arrangements, with some guitar crunch and moog whirr. A fine comic miniaturist, frontman John K. Samson continues to write brainy but beautiful homages to the simple stuff we all feel affection for: cats, championship pennants, snow covered roads, small towns, each other.
“Tournament Of Hearts” is an homage to the Winnepegian pastime of curling (sweeping a stone across ice), but it’s really about missing someone to the depths of your soul. Samson is always trying on different guises to get at true feelings. From the point of view of a tabby named Virtue, he sings, “It had something to do with the rain, leeching lonely dirt,” his voice poised between innocence and experience.
Another character sketch, “Elegy For Gump Worsley”, tells the legend of the scotch-drinking, mask-refusing goalie over a cryptic and sweet banjo and slide guitar, while “Sun In An Empty Room” creates a platonic vision of what absence feels like as Thin Lizzy guitars ring and the back beat swings.
The title track pits a martial drum groove against flashes of synths and glockenspiel as it addresses the absurdity of discovering who you are when you’re in a band with nowhere to go and no way back to wherever you began. These vulnerable, catchy rock songs always sound inviting, though you’ll never be quite sure where they’re taking you.