I can't help but feel that with each album, The Weakerthans have worked on better defining themselves and what they want to be, and each album has seen an improvement in the quality of the music because of it. Or at least, that's how I felt about all their work up to Reconstruction Site (2003), which granted was only their third album. But it lead me to really looking forward to this, their fourth album, and I honestly anticipated it as possibly being the best album of 2007.
Overall, I feel like this album is just an attempt to do Reconstruction Site 2: The Reckoning. Almost everything gives that impression away to me. The title, the song pacing, the overall sound, and that fact that they did write literally a direct sequel to a song from their previous album. "Plea From A Cat Named Virtute" was a brilliant song from Reconstruction. It was written from the point of view of his cat, who was tired of all his emo-ish depressed whining and was pushing him to getting on with his life and returning to being a social being. "Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure" is a fairly pretty song in Reunion, but it looses its effect for several reasons. One reason is that the song has basically already been done on the last album. Another reason is that's much more obviously from the perspective of a cat ("After scrapping with the ferals and the tabby/Let you brush my matted fur/How I'd kneed into your chest while you were sleeping/Shallow breathing made me purr"). The previous album was much more subtle in its delivery, leaving you to infer the fact that it was about a cat from context clues. It wasn't hard to figure out, but I can't help but feel it's an overall better song for not practically spelling it out as blatantly as "...Explains Her Depature" does.
My biggest complaint with this album is "Elegy for Gump Worsley." I can appreciate art when it's done right, but this song is just such an obvious attempt to be flat out "experimental" and "artsy," and such obvious attempts rarely cause any feeling in me save for nausea. "(Hospital Vespers)" and "(Past-Due)" from Reconstruction Site were similarly artsy types, but those songs were done right because they were still songs, and they didn't completely break the flow of the album. "Elegy" isn't terrible, but it just makes me sad that they would do something like this at all.
And all and all, I don't feel that at any point this album is actually terrible. None of the songs are all that bad. But they just don't reach the level that Reconstruction did. That album was filled with brilliantly written, thoughtful, introspective songs with plenty of references to high literature. This album maintains some of the song writing wit of the previous album, but none of the songs really seem as deep or well thought-out as their previous album counterparts. It just really feels to me like they devolved a bit here. Though Reunion seems as though it was intended as a spiritual successor to Reconstruction Site, the overall quality reminds me more of their second album. Which I guess, again, is not a bad thing, because I always liked Left and Leaving, their sophomore outing, but I had just kind of hoped that this band would continue the trend of getting better, not sinking to a previous level.
So all and all, this is by no means a bad album. It's a good album that is merely dissapointing, because I can't help but think, whenever listening to it or Reconstruction Site, that it could have been such a great album, but instead we only got a good one. The biggest shame is that it took 4 years of waiting to only be let down.
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