We’re supposed to be the can-do nation, but while our finest young rock bands murmur in-jokes or proudly declaim inanities, our polite buddies north of the border have been, how you say, handing our asses to us in the earnestness department. Maybe it’s the deadening political and cultural climate of America’s last four years, but it seems like the big American indie bands spend a lot of time in bad moods they don’t understand (although all this “take you on a cruise” talk on the new Interpol record implies that they’re at least going to get out and play some shuffleboard) or working on that Impeccably Messy look and trying to pick up models. And while I don’t know the members of Constantines – hailing from Guelph Rock City, Ontario, Canada – they sure sounded like they meant every obscure word on their 2003 Sub Pop debut, Shine a Light. Now Sub Pop has re-released (sans bonus tracks, or much else in the way of flashy extras) their eponymous 2001 debut. Constantines originally came out in homemade packaging and very limited numbers on Canada’s tiny Three Gut Records, but became a Cinderella story of an underground success, and even won the group a Juno Award (Canada’s Grammy, kinda). The same likely wouldn’t have happened had this record been released in the states, although that has nothing to do with artistic merit. There’s something in Constantines’ big-ness – the calls for “the death of rock and roll,” the revolutionary feints, the willingness to go for the big rock gusto – that just doesn’t fit in with most American indie rock. It seems odd to write, but Constantines as a band, and this debut record, are too bold to be anything but Canadian.
So, for us irony-soaked downtown doofuses, that makes for a few weird moments. Interrupting as it does my rock-crit diet of flabby hipster solipsism, Constantines’ hearty and apparently heartfelt we-really-mean-this routine is a bit of a shock to the system. How lead vocalist Bryan Webb’s raw, emotive vocals will work for you is a matter of taste; I like them, but there’s no shortage of embarassing rock comparisons to be made if you don’t. Of course, it’s a risk for a singer not to mumble, or try to sound exactly like the singer from a sainted band from two decades ago, and in Webb’s case the gamble pays off more often than not. When these songs don’t work – and the faintly goofy rock-is-revolution anthem “Some Party” is a good example of this – they’re still sort of admirable, if only because of how obviously the band’s heart is pinned raggedly to its sleeve.
There’s a lot of serious talk about rock and roll on this record, which, again, is kind of Ontario-n of Constantines. In “Arizona,” the stomping album opener that demands “the death of rock and roll” (among other bold statements), it comes off as a lot of heat to a rather unclear purpose. But when this seriousness about rock works – most notably in the moody, raging dirge “Hyacinth Blues,” which deals with rock and roll martyrs in intelligent and passionate fashion – it works well. “Justice” hitches a lyrical riff about rock nihilism (I think) to a pumping guitar-drum engine and rocks ahead with extreme prejudice. And when Constantines abandon the maximum-ass-kick musical momentum and lyrical rock exegesis altogether for the hushed, introspective “Saint You” and the instrumental “McKnight Life” that follows it, the results are astonishingly good. As good as Shine A Light was, there’s very little on it that can match “Saint You”’s quiet clarity. Constantines get a lot of mileage out of their churning rock on this action, and considering how fiery and confident that melodic assault is, I wouldn’t want to see them leave it behind. But “Saint You” is a hint that there are some great small songs in this band, and that they can deliver all the emotional punch of their blustering, blistering balls-oot rockers without turning the amps up to 11.
Constantines is a good record with great moments, but those expecting a rawer, rougher Shine A Light will be disappointed. The songs still pulse with the energy that made Shine A Light so good, and Constantines, like its follow-up, is a remarkably diverse record. But there’s more than one way to be raw, and where Shine A Light’s success depended in large part on its ability to draw counterpoints from song to song, Constantines is a bit less deft and a bit more homogeneous. It also has the unfortunate timing of arriving in my stereo several years after its original release (and on the heels of its superior follow-up), at a time when revolutionaries armed with amps and a few simple chords, and their war against rock and roll, seems almost depressingly quaint. Here, now, looking down the barrel of another four years of quasi-authoritarian quasi-theocracy and the insecurity that comes with it, it’s not the death of rock and roll that I’m worried about. |