Music Sumo

Billed as the “Four & More” tour, Winnipeg’s The Weakerthans set up residency at the Independent for a sold-out four-night stretch of dates, each a celebration of a different full length from their modestly-sized but venerable discography. The album show, if it is common enough to be known as such, is a peculiar kind of palimpsest.  Original, recorded material is inevitably written over with individual experience and sentiment. At a typical show, however, songs range across the entire breadth of an artist’s catalogue, usually with an emphasis on the more recent, and the listener’s connections to the music range similarly. By playing material from a single album – particularly an older, much beloved one – an album show evokes a more cohesive set of associations, saturating the listener in a specific and concentrated nostalgia made only more intense by the urgency and immediacy of the live setting.

For their part…