Coda.fm

Reunion Tour

by The Weakerthans

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This Canadian quartet has always excelled at mixing pop hooks with slice-of-life lyrics that earn comparisons to short story masters like Grace Paley and Raymond Carver. The curiously titled Reunion Tour (four years between albums but they never disbanded) ups the lyrical ante ever more with contagious tunes like "Hymn of the Medical Oddity" and "Relative Surplus Value." Not to mention "Tournament of Hearts," easily the best song ever written about the Olympic sport of curling. Musically, if you could imagine the Mountain Goats crossed with Death Cab--or even an older, slower, rocking-er Decembrists more in love with life itself than the dictionary--you'd not be too off the mark. Recorded over the course of a winter week and a half in a Manitoba factory during its off hours, the album sounds surprisingly warm, lush, and vigorous. Give these songs time and they'll flower in your head, sprouting movies based on lines like "where the radio resounds in Doppler traffic," itself inspired by an Edward Hopper painting, but you don't need to know any of that to dig it, of course. --Mike McGonigal