>>PREVIEW
CONSTANTINES
Saturday, May 20
MacEwan Hall
With the quirky appeal and inviting charm of an old patchwork quilt, the Constantines’ latest album, Tournament of Hearts, steadily seeps into your pores until you’re completely cocooned. A distinct departure in tone and content from their previous effort, Shine a Light, Tournament fuses elements of working-class blues and fringes of country-twang with their distinctive gritty and sexy brand of rock.
The songs are a bit simpler on the new album, partly because the band changed the way it thought about the recording process. Songs aren’t a finite thing and the Tournament reflects the band’s raw, live energy.
"We’ve started to jam a bit more live, draw the songs out a little bit, let the songs have a life outside of their recorded version," explains front man Bryan Webb.
"We’re a live band predominantly – we write songs to be played live in a space with other people in it. The struggle with the band has been trying to figure out how to record ’cause none of us are really studio savvy. We have this real hesitation when we’re in the studio, whereas playing live it’s a real attempt to create a moment of being and creating and feeling what’s happening. We’re still trying to figure how to get into that place when we’re recording our songs."
As for the pared down quantity and sparser feel of the new lyrics, Webb explains the shift partly came about as a consequence of their musical success.
"It just has a lot to do with the idea of work, the nature of work and the nature of productivity and productivity as a part of a healthy mind. This is the first record we made after some of us had given up our day jobs and … (I) felt a little guilty about not having a day job and struggled with that for a bit. I feel really lucky to be in that position, but it’s also a strange thing, there’s a weird anxiety when you don’t have to punch in every day."
Without the constraints of a normal workday, Webb has seen creative output increase tremendously and this schedule suits his writing style much better.
"It usually takes a long time for me to write a song. I’ll write in pieces and things come together that weren’t originally even conceived together…" he says. "The outcome surprises me, that’s when I get the most excited or the most satisfaction out of it, when there’s some sort of end product that I didn’t see coming."
Webb and cohorts also like to throw off their audiences. Whether it’s changing the dynamics of their intense live show or veering into uncharted musical territory, the Ontario lads have enjoyed evolving in unpredictable ways.
"I’d like to think we’re surprising people – that’s probably the best thing we can do to stay vital. It’s really strange still for us to feel that we have an audience outside of our group of friends and people we see regularly in town," Webb says.
"That people have a concept of our band, a static idea of what our band is, and that we could violate that ourselves is a pretty strange position to be in, a strange perspective to have on making music and output and productivity, just to think that there is an expectation for a certain quality. It’s flattering that people have high expectations of what we’re doing."
It seems only natural to raise the bar as they expand the portfolio of what they create while maintaining their best quality – an uncanny ability to balance a sense of approachability and familiarity with a seductive veneer of flammability. You can’t help but want to listen. |
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