While the sentimentality of being the first Weakerthans album I listened to will surely keep me biased, I truly believe it is also the finest of the four albums they put out. The band is firing on all cylinders here and has truly settled into their sound. Meanwhile, John K. Samson’s songwriting hit new heights here, planting him firmly, for me, in the upper echelon of all-time songwriters. His literate, charming and witty style contains so many small details that bring me such joy every time I revisit these songs - little fragments that absolutely floor me and leave me marvelling at his craft like,
“And I broke / Like a bad joke / Somebody's uncle told / At a wedding reception in 1972.” The phrasing and depth of image here still to this day leave me with a feeling of “How the hell did he do that!”
Being well into my poetry “career” at the time of discovering this album, I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took before I realized the short, framing songs that beginning-middle-end the album were sonnets. This again was a giant “Holy shit!” moment for me. And a bit of a facepalm. Considering how excited I’d get when someone would have the audacity to perform sonnets at a poetry slam, it’s hilarious how the sung versions eluded me for a time. These snapshot sonnets perfectly lay the themes of grief, loss and hope that texture
Reconstruction Site. "(Hospital Vespers)" makes me tear up almost every time.
On my first pass through this album all those years ago I may have taken songs like “One Great City,” “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute” and "Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)" to have more of a novelty bent, but many listens have proven that me quite wrong. Novel concepts and witty writing yes, but not novelty at all. Nearly anybody from Canada will probably relate to “One Great City”’s line
“I hate Winnipeg” - perhaps most especially many people
from Winnipeg, but there is an ambivalence far deeper than just a flip-off to the city here. And Virtute’s Plea is a particularly adept external examination of living with depression seen through the eyes of Samson’s recurring cohabitating feline.
As mentioned off the top, I feel like the band really gelled their sound with this album. Their debut,
Fallow, very much sounded like Samson’s post-Propagandhi album with its rougher edges and two songs that were originally recorded with Propagandhi, while
Left and Leaving found the Weakerthans further finding their footing and putting out an absolutely fantastic collection of songs, but to me was still lacking the cohesion the found here on
Reconstruction Site. Besides the placement of the sonnets holding the themes of the album together, the sequencing of the entire album feels like a perfect container for the material and the attention of the listeners. The tracks here seem to flow perfectly into one another to create much more the feeling of a journey than simply a collection of songs.
Ultimately, I don’t think it’s possible to go wrong with
any Weakerthans album, or either of John K. Samson’s solo albums to date. This further intensifies the sheepishness of having ignored the band for so long over petty reasons. Particularly given that Samson’s poetic fortitude as a songwriter really rocks off the socks I seldom wear! As a bonus, while I haven’t met any of the others, John K. Samson is an absolute sweetheart and a genuinely fascinating and engaged human being - and what’s not to love about that?!
