Constantines - Young Canadian lions

The six months after the Constantines stopped playing was one of the most fucked up periods in my life. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t really know how to play music outside of The Constantines. We had learned to be musicians together. There were no real goodbyes, but there was a complicated mourning process, figuring out that there were other things to devote oneself to. Trying to write a resume was a nightmare. Life went on.

These are the words Bryan Webb uses to talk about a band that was his life, at least for ten long years and four albums, and to announce that this band will take the stage again, this year, in 2014.

Let's take a step back: Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Late Nineties. After some time spent in emocore, Steve Lambke, Bryan Webb, Doug MacGregor and Dallas Wehrle form Constantines. They soon move to London and eventually settle in Toronto, Ontario's pulsing artistic hub. Here, in 2001, they decide to make their first album, The Constantines, with their friends from Guelph Lisa Moran and Tyler Clarke Burke, founders of the local independent label Three Gut Records. Inspired by the post-hardcore of Fugazi, with an "ear" tuned to math-rock, The Constantines is an instant success for the fledgling label. Well-woven harmonic-rhythmic textures from two guitars over broken rhythms, dry sound and production. A fierce and intelligent debut, one that gets people talking about "art-punk".

The opening track, "Arizona", sounds like it could have come straight out of the Dischord stable (not just Fugazi, but also Lungfish and Dag Nasty). Bryan Webb's gravelly voice – closer in type to Paul Westerberg than Ian MacKaye – will become the band's trademark both on their more "squared-off" punk songs and on the more "square" indie-rock ones ("No Ecstasy"). "Long Distance Four" recalls Van Pelt as much as "Seven A.M." recalls Rites of Spring, while "Justice" and "Hyachint Blues" already carry that black soul that will come out more explicitly on the second album, one they'll share with future labelmates Afghan Whigs. Despite the overall post-hardcore matrix, other tracks step away from the post-punk urgency and roughness, like the intimate ballad "St. You". These are the dress rehearsals for what will become their masterpiece, Shine A Light (2003, Three Gut and Sub Pop Records).

Having shaken off any remaining doubts, including their stylistic debts to the Dischord stable, the Constantines set about making their first truly personal album, one marked by a clear and distinctive eclecticism. First, though, in the two years leading up to the release of Shine A Light, they put out a couple of EPs that document the work in progress: in 2002, The Modern Sinner Nervous Man for Suicide Squeeze Records, and in 2003, a month before the new album came out, Nighttime Anytime on the US label Sub Pop.

If "National Hum" is an opening still indebted to the post-hardcore of their debut, the production already stands out for its richness, layering and spatial depth. The off-beat bass and the ragged drum patterns kick off the title track, Shine A Light: “Don’t talk to me about simple things/ There is no such thing/ All a man can build is his vision/ and I love my man for trying”. The songs alternate more harmoniously between moments of fullness and emptiness, with a more precise guitar arrangement that no longer piles up as it did on The Constantines, but instead works on verticality rather than the horizontal density of interlocking phrases. It's as if, on their second album, the Constantines made the same kind of stylistic leap that "Red Medicine" (1995, Dischord) represented for Fugazi, allowing for the obvious differences in the directions each band chose. Indeed, the horn arrangements on "Insectivora" and "Goodbye Baby and Amen" open the door to other genres, like jazz and soul.

The gem of the album is undoubtedly "Young Lions", an indie-rock track that becomes the band's anthem. “Loosen your collar/ Shake off the wires/ Run like a river/ Glow like a beacon fire”. The verse, rhythmically post-punk but carried by a thick bass sound and minimal guitar counterpoint, builds unstoppably toward the chorus's release. It's not the only indie-rock moment on the record – "On to You" and "Poison" also move away from post-hardcore – before the band "returns to Fugazi" territory with "Scroundel Babes", a track that sounds like it could have been played by Q and Not U (not coincidentally, another Dischord band). "Tank Commander (Hang Up in a Warehouse Town)" picks up the pace with an insistently pounded snare rim, a synth sound that opens onto psychedelia, crunching guitar and an invoking voice: "Howling at the moon/ Night after night". The closing track is the folk-rock of "Sub-Domestic", with its chorus sung in unison and its bluegrass guitar.

Warmly received both at home (nominated for a Juno Award for "Best Alternative Album") and in the United States (Pitchfork's review was equally enthusiastic), Shine A Light perfectly captures the Constantines' newfound maturity, a band able to absorb a wide range of genres (post-hardcore, rock, folk, jazz, soul) and give them back as fundamentally indie-rock songs, finding their essence precisely in the multi-stylistic nature that makes the record a kind of genre-that-is-no-genre.

The future, however, would be anything but easy.

With Tournament Of Hearts (2005, Sub Pop Records) the Canadian band attempts to streamline its sound: the rhythmic suspension and guitar triggers of "Draw Us Lines" mark the perfect handover from the heterogeneous, at times misleading songwriting of the early albums to a more conventional song format. Tournament Of Hearts is leaner than its predecessors and bets everything on a conventional, up-to-date rock immediacy. The guitar accents counterbalance a squarer rhythm section, which for the first time is fully at the service of Bryan Webb's voice, the protagonist both in presence and dynamics.

"Hotline Operator" and "Love In Fear" seem to retrace the steps of the later Afghan Whigs, though without managing to explode into the kind of memorable choruses à-la Dulli, despite the singer's strong emotional charge. With the downtempo of "Lizaveta" the band eases off the accelerator in favor of a desert-like heaviness, saturated by a horn section that dramatically underscores the final line "We were born to live". Three chords and a traditional gait carry the catchier "Soon Enough", on which Webb's voice moves freely, betraying his measured yet deeply passionate singer-songwriter instincts. By contrast, the rockier "Working Full-Time" sounds tired and overdone, attempting to recapture the mantra-like abrasiveness of Shine A Light's best moments without quite hitting the mark.

Tournament Of Hearts marks the turning point – and partial loss of direction – from deconstructed indie-rock energy toward a more classic songwriting approach, one inspired as much by the legends of American-made rock of the last 30 years as by a new generation of Canadian artists who, often with more skill and restraint than their European or American indie counterparts, manage to shine on their own terms. The last part of the album is even more muddled. On "Thieves" and "Windy Road" the vocals belong to guitarist Steve Lambke, thinner and less commanding in timbre: the former intrigues with its subtle, nervy guitar counterpoints reminiscent of dEUS, broken up by horns that seem to arrive straight from the Broken Social Scene of "You Forgot it in People"; the latter is a brief, harmless, fully acoustic and whispered episode, thankfully preceded by the album's most effective song, "You Are A Conductor". "There a little evil in everything", sings an inspired Bryan Webb, seizing for another four minutes the gravitas needed to make this third record an interesting – if only partly successful – coming-of-age test, the attempt of a band trying to stay current and relevant in a decade of deep musical transformation.

It would take three years and a label change to gather up the seeds planted by Tournament Of Hearts: with Kensington Heights (2008, Arts & Crafts) the Constantines return with clearer ideas and a fresher sound, fixing the partial missteps of the past without changing the formula. The record opens, in fact, with the guitar-driven fury – spiced up by the usual keyboard sound teetering on the edge of gaudy – of "Hard Feelings", a chaotic divertissement that kicks off a record which pushes the loud/quiet dynamic to its extreme. "Million Star Hotel" is the perfect example: suspended, deafening guitars in the best stoner tradition lead to a punchy chorus that then gives way to the sprawl of a verse where the light reverb of the snare hits marks out a slowed tempo over which Webb's dirty voice can resurface. The few distorted bass notes and controlled feedback carry "Trans Canada" to a cathartic final burst of screaming that this time has nothing to envy in Greg Dulli's pathos.

Without changing the chord progression, the Canadians keep the energy high with the continuous instrumental carpet of "Shower of Stones", over which the second guitarist's declaimed vocal stands out. With the nostalgic "Our Age" and its handful of insistent electric guitar and keyboard notes, melody takes center stage once again, while "Time Can Be Overcome" is the perfect odd ballad, long in runtime and rich in extended silences.

It's clear: nothing new on the horizon. The Constantines aren't rewriting rock history – quite the opposite, they borrow liberally from the classic past, like a Great Lakes version of Wilco. The Dischord echoes of their debut and the multi-stylistic approach – understood as a source of novelty – of Shine A Light now feel light years away. The Constantines of "Time Can Be Overcome", as well as of the equally intense "I Will Not Sing A Hateful Song", are excellent craftsmen of songwriter-driven rock; a rock that nonetheless still holds on to flashes of rupture here and there, that doesn't linger on leaning into its own excesses (guitar work that's anything but timid or heavily effected, the psychedelic shades of Will Kidman's keyboard sounds and, not least, Bryan Webb's raw, deep, passionate and genuine voice) and that, for this reason, still deserves to be called "indie".

Returning to Kensington Heights, there's a college-rock air to "Brother Run Them Down", whether due to the lyrics ("you are not your generation") or to a catchier sound somewhere between Buffalo Tom and fellow travelers Weakerthans, always tackled with a dramatic streak inherited from Bruce Springsteen. The quintet brings things full circle with the solemn final crescendo of "Do What You Can Do": "You can do what you want with what you have": a parting thought that might sound like a justification, but perhaps, more simply, sums up the philosophy of a small but mighty Canadian band with a healthy dose of compositional talent, class to spare, and no pretensions whatsoever.

It's curious that what ultimately brought the Constantines' career to a close was an EP revisiting, in semi-acoustic form, a handful of their finest songs – a kind of in-studio unplugged session as a gift to fans. Too Slow For Love (2009, Arts & Crafts) is a small, imperfect masterpiece that finally reveals a band's true added value: the ability to write songs that can stand on their own – even with greater dignity – once you strip away the layers of distortion and drums, laying them completely bare. "Our Age" is even more moving in this lo-fi voice-and-guitar version, and "Young Lions", their signature song, comes through for what it truly is: a perfect pop song, the kind you only get to write once in a lifetime.

In 2009 Will Kidman left the band and everything seemed to grind to a halt, without any official breakup. Steve Lambke launched the Baby Eagle project, also collaborating with The Weather Station, while Bryan Webb carried on with a modest solo career of singer-songwriter albums. Nothing especially memorable, nothing comparable to the urgency of those early Constantines records or the authority of the band's later period. And so, a few years on, we arrive at today's reunion:

There is too much love and too much life in this music for it to only exist in the past. We’re happy to announce that The Constantines – Will Kidman, Steve Lambke, Doug MacGregor, Bry Webb and Dallas Wehrle – will be playing some shows this summer, leading up to the 11th Anniversary Reissue of Shine a Light.

Maria Teresa Soldani: The Constantines, Shine A Light

Enrico Viarengo: Tournament Of Hearts, Kensington Heights

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