The Weakerthans- Left and Leaving

I don’t like slow songs, as a rule. I like my music to have energy, punch, and a bit of zest. The art of the album is to balance the slow with the fast in order to create an engaging experience for the listener. This album teeters on the edge of being too slow, but even the slow songs have an emotion and lyrical skill that keeps them interesting.

This is an album about growing up, about moving on. It’s not about adolescence but more about that growing up you do in your twenties. It’s a weird phase, “between past and present tense” (“Aside”) when you’re trying to define yourself as something new, but are still connected to the past.  A past you may want to forget.

There’s a person on this album, a “you” that keeps popping up, and that relationship between the singer and them seems to be one of the keys to growing up, of creating a new identity. The singer, John K. Samson, seems ambivalent on this point. He wants to move on, but wants to hold on at the same time. He feels a certain nostalgia for this “you.”

We need to talk about Samson, because he is the centerpiece of this album. The man is a talented songwriter, who writes whole verses that are as quotable as single lines. To list them would take up too much space, but my favorite is:

Terrified of telephones
And shopping malls and knives
We're drowning in the pools of other lives
Rely a bit too heavily
On alcohol and irony
Get clobbered on by courtesy
In love with love and lousy poetry

 The man’s voice might be a bit off putting, he sounds like Blink 182 and the guy from Death Cab for Cutie had a baby, but get past that, which is not all that much, and you’ll be very much rewarded.

4/5 The critic who introduced me to this album described listening to it a lot in his twenties, memorizing every lyric, that sort of thing. It is that sort of album yes, but it can also be appreciated without having to make it a part of yourself