The Weakerthans – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

Yesterday the fitness instructor for our apartment building said she’d grown weary of the Spotify playlist she’d cued up for the past few sessions. Nominally “Tom Petty,” the list, liberally, blared hits from the likes of Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other mainstream popsters. When she asked for suggestions of a new list, I hesitated, but then figured The Weakerthans might be a good segue. And I was right.

Spotify’s algorithm for Petty calculated that Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” belonged in the same batch as “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” my favorite Petty tune.¹ To my surprise, during the half dozen Weakerthans songs to which we stretched (our strength-building having been performed during the first, mm…, stretch): no such mismatched filler. Further surprise came when the playlist contained not one but both of the band’s two songs sung from the point of view of a cat.

Comrades in Denver recently attended a performance by the Manitoba band Propagandhi. I knew the group’s name but not their music and poked around a bit. If you like your tunes hard and fast, guitar-driven and polemically positioned, with gorgeously apocalyptic album art, this is up your alley. But I was quite surprised to learn that John K. Samson was the band’s bassist for nearly six years.

According to the cliché about art school, you learn the rules before breaking them. Samson can be seen, superficially, as having worked in reverse, with a minimalist-with-message band before leaving school to fashion, with The Weakerthans, a new song in an old mold: figurative, more muted, embellished with just enough magic in its realism to keep us inquiring. Perhaps the finest example of this craft is the band’s ballad “Pamphleteer.”

Tag: The Weakerthans

Et tu, Virtute.

The feeble strength of one