I hear you hum an unfamiliar song, thought maybe you would come along.
So it’s been a while since I last wrote here. I partly blame WordPress for having a shitty password reset service that only works 50% of the time, apparently; partly myself for being lazy and forgetting what my password was. But anyway, it’s time for me to write about the Weakerthans. As I said at the end of the last post, we’re going to pick up with Anchorless. Fast-forward a couple of months to this February or so, to one of those nights where I was looking up lyrics for no specific reason, and one of the songs I examined was Anchorless. In the comments section, I noticed someone saying that they preferred the Weakerthans’ version, and my interest was piqued. Not quite enough that I went to seek them out immediately, but I made a mental note that there was a band out there who had done a version of Anchorless, and the name of this band was the Weakerthans.
Luckily, before I had a chance to forget, I befriended Matt of Names of Foreign Towns the Homemade Slides not-exactly-fame. I noticed two things fairly early on: he had near-impeccable musical taste, and he was also a fan of this ‘Weakerthans’ band. I decided to download their first album, Fallow. And that’s where all this began.
An unwrapped gift: on Propagandhi.
So I was going to write a review of Reconstruction Site, because it’s fantastic, but then I realised I wouldn’t be able to do that without it turning it into a post about how great the Weakerthans are. So I decided to backtrack, and begin from the beginning. And the beginning of the story is with Propagandhi. About this time one month and one year ago, I got Less Talk, More Rock for my brother’s birthday. I hadn’t heard them before, but he gave me a list of albums he wanted, and I approved of the bandname, making them my first choice. Off to My Local Independent Record Store I headed, and lo and behold, for a princely sum of £14.99, was the album. (My Local Independent Record Store happens to have a very good but very expensive punk section. Rarely would I consider 25 minutes worth £15, but Propagandhi are a very special punk rock band, as will become clear.)
(disclaimer: this post will be more personal than I usually intend them to be. Some situations demand it.)
