August 01, 2007

As I wrapped my grubby mitts around an advanced copy of The Weakerthan’s new album, Reunion Tour, I danced a little jig. The kind you do when you finally have an album that’s brilliance you have been predicting for some time. I shared my excitement with a couple people in my immediate vicinity but I was shot down with disheartening rapidity and I solemnly realised that The Weakerthans were indeed a ‘Yes it is just you’ band.

As in:
Me: “Hay gais, is it just me or are the Weakerthans lieek, the best!”.
Nearby dullards:”……..” .

The Weakerthans are one of those bands that no one seems to have the common decency, worldliness or incomprehensible good taste that I do, to appreciate. I’m sure everyone’s got ‘em but if my nearest and dearest is any indication, there is an antidote. He’s a perpetual and well renowned music bully.

He remedies the forlorn feeling of being alone in his band appreciation by downright bashing a band into his friends’ heads with rote repetition and the persuasive skills of a highly effective publicist. He’s discovered the repressed metalhead in the most stringent Top 40 listeners, once converting a Timberlake fan to Dillinger Escape Plan. He weens Metro-frequenting boppers off their beloved Aguilera and into Save Ferris. He turned his father onto Beatsteaks, his hippy sister to Rx Bandits and finally due to diligent mix-taping and perhaps slipping a little something in the ol’ earl grey, introduced his grandmother to the world of Mad Caddies and Flogging Molly.

DO YOU KNOW how unnerving it is to walk into a lounge room of 1930s memorabilia and mothballs and be greeted with a rosy 75 year old Granny jitterbugging to ‘Drunken Lullabies’?!!