Flashes of Panic

Let me trace this one back.

• Sarah Harmer plugs the Weakerthans at a show. She sings on a few tracks from their album Reconstruction Site.
• Kathleen Edwards brings Jim Bryson on as part of her band when I saw her. One of his songs is on her album Back to Me.
• Jim Bryson is touring with the Weakerthans, who I saw tonight (er, last night) at the Paradise.

I am now convinced there are only two or three bands in Canada, and the same eight or ten session musicians rotate between them all. (Both Bryson and Harmer have toured with Josh Ritter, too. Is Idaho in Canada yet?)

I’ll let you figure out what the Weakerthans are all about; there are some representative songs on their site. They’re earnest and energetic, loud music and soft singing, lots of poignancy and no irony unless they’re being earnest about it. If there’s a good side to living in a major metropolitan area, it’s that I could say which show I was seeing to half a dozen people throughout the day and not one of them had heard of the band before, and yet the show was sold out. A big room full of music geeks like me out to see a bunch of Canadians who look (and sometimes sound) like they woke up about ten minutes before coming on stage play songs with titles like “Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call” or “This Is A Fire Door Never Leave Open.”

The stage show is sort of like a cross between They Might Be Giants and the Replacements as played by Aerosmith (and they did play the Mats’ “Swinging Party,” which Bryson has also been known to play in live shows,) and John K. Sampson pretty much smiles through the whole thing, like he’s alternately bemused or overwhelmed by his own good luck.

The drawback to the fanatical crowd was that this kind of band draws just enough of the fans who have memorized every song, and don’t just sing along, but yell along, and apparently are utterly tone-deaf but don’t realize it. That guy was standing right behind me, I think.

Bryson played a short opening set, and I was surprised how many of his songs I recognized—“Feel Much Better” was in the SXSW 2005 Torrent, and Kathleen Edwards recorded his “Somewhere Else”—and then The Last Town Chorus played a set as well. (“The Wire Waltz” was also in that SXSW torrent.) I’ve been reading their travelogue for a little while now, and it’s kind of fun. She snapped a shot of a woman in the back, towards the end of her set, and said, “That will be on the Internet in twenty minutes.”

Now Playing: Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961) from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans

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