Last night, I was packing up my room, and I reached for a CD to put on more or less at random, and I hit on The Weakerthans album Reconstruction Site. I picked it up some time ago, surprised that there was a third Weakerthans record, and I listened to it once, and I thought to myself, “Yep, this is the Weakerthans,” but really, it’s a better album than that, and it deserves to be mentioned on its own.

The problem for me is that the Weakerthans isn’t a band I went out and discovered on my own. Fallow was a birthday present in 2001 from a very special girl, and for me, the Weakerthans have always been associated with her in my mind. Nevermind that I love Fallow and Left and Leaving in their own right, they just aren’t a Judah band. They will probably always be at least half K in my mind, and after we stopped seeing each other, I stopped following them. I don’t know where I got the impression that they had stopped making music, but eventually I did find Reconstruction Site and pick it up.

I imagine that they aren’t for everyone. They’re very polished, like a Teenage Fanclub, and not particularly edgy on first listen, so there are a lot of people I just wouldn’t recommend them to. But I also can’t really imagine anyone listening to an album carefully and at the end, deciding that they just don’t like them. There’s just too much substance to dismiss.