The stupidest preachment in popular culture: "Punk is dead."The second stupidest preachment in popular culture: "Punk lives."
John Samson is a couple records deep into his career as strongest of the Weakerthans, a band who are punk politically, but emphatically pop aesthetically. Regardless, the "punk: dead or alive?" quandary will likely dog him forever. Samson played bass in Propagandhi who were either lame-o peace-punk latecomers or brilliant protest rock of the first order, depending on your position along several endlessly complicated cultural and personal axes. If you're inclined to call "Nailing Descartes to the Wall/(Liquid) Meat is Still Murder" a great idea for a song title, you probably love the Props, but it's just as likely you prefer to get your politics explained and/or affirmed by people other than rock bands, in which case Propaghandi may well have grated on your nerves. In either case, Propaghandi may have answered the "alive or dead" question, but it's impossible to say uniformly which answer they indicated.
Samson, who writes, sings and plays a host of instruments in the Weakerthans, seems to have shed most of his previous band's preachy trappings, as well as their punky ones. Cynical wags might like to call the Weakerthans emo, since Left and Leaving is ass-deep in ballads about "the outstanding bills of my heart." But, despite a critic's deepest categorical longings, the tag doesn't exactly fit. Where emo emphasizes baroque song structures and wall-of-sound dynamics, Samson and company produce what often sounds like de-fanged pop-punk. All midtempo rhythms and three-note hooks, Left and Leaving is unwilling to give up the mohawked ghost. Emoizers like to talk a lot of game about elevating or artifying punk rock, but the Weakerthans are more preoccupied with using the form's greatest strengths. Even the weirdest stuff here speaks with gut-level urgency.
Though the band's work so far does bespeak boredom with punk's formal constraints, the Weakerthans don't experiment for the sake of experimentation alone, which is both their saving grace and greatest flaw. Thankfully, none of the arrangements on the album seem motivated by the need to prove that Samson is a savvy, sophisticated guy after all (even on the one that starts out kinda sounding like Cat Power), but that contentedness with middling ambition can make the record sort of a trudge to sit through. Without ideas oozing from every pore, Left and Leaving remains a well-executed, acceptably anthemic rock record with its share of hooks and pleasantries. And unless a listener is positively convinced they don't have enough of those, it's not quite worth endless spinning.
Left and Leaving isn't a new world to visit and explore; it's a postcard from a friend on vacation. Which is why it might be worth it to put the question to Samson and his distinguished panel whether punk survives into the present day. The Weakerthans seem to imply it's somewhere in between. Punk remains a frustratingly limited genre, but from its calcifying rules and orders, people are crafting oddball pleasures like this one. Whether punk is dead, alive and well, or not yet born doesn't really matter here. You can take your pick. Just throw it a wake, a birthday party or a baby shower. And whatever you do, sing along.
