Weakerthans Roll Into Town

The Rolling Tundra Revue tour featuring the Constantines and Winnipeg's own, Weakerthans landed in town last Friday night for the first of a two night stand at the Burton Cummings Theatre. The Weakerthans are one of few bands I try to catch whenever they come back home and you can always count on them for an entertaining show. Their 21 song set featured songs from all four albums and they treated the hometown crowd to two encores consisting of 6 songs.

One thing that slightly annoyed me and distracted my attention throughout the concert was the usual chatter and shout outs from the crowd. This usually doesn't bug me too much, but the (high pitch, really loud!) whistling (especially during the encore) during the songs became a competition between a few attention seeking idiots. I know it feels nice to be acknowledged by the performers we paid to watch, but to continually yell and shout, "happy birthday John" and other stupid comments gets tiresome and embarrassing. During the opening encore songs, One Great City and My Favourite Chords when John K performs solo, some guys across the aisle from me shouted out some clever dialogue, "where's your f*cking band!" and "f*ck you John K. Samson!", exactly at that moment (I don't think it was a coincidence), Samson stopped mid-song to re tune his guitar. He started the song up again, but a minute later he stopped again and changed guitars. Earlier in the show he joked about how he remembers his first beer, obviously in reference to some guys that were yelling at him and then a few songs later he asked the "boys" to stop shouting at him because it distracted him and it would be bad for everyone else. Samson is probably too nice a guy to make a bigger deal out of it.

I've listed the setlist from the show and the link below to download the whole show. Enjoy!

WEAKERTHANS
Burton Cummings Theatre
Winnipeg, Manitoba
April 17, 2009

1. Everything Must Go
2. Tournament Of Hearts
3. Our Retired Explorer
4. Night Windows
5. Reconstruction Site
6. Aside
7. Civil Twilight
8. Bigfoot
9. Plea From A Cat Named Virtue
10. The Reasons
11. Elegy For Elsabet
12. Left And Leaving
13. Relative Surplus Value
14. Benediction
15. Manifest

encore 1
16. One Great City
17. My Favourite Chords
18. Confessions Of A Futon Revolutionist
19 This Is A fire Door Never Leave Open
20. Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure

encore 2
21. Pamphleteer

Download the complete show:
Weakerthans 2009-04-17 .rar (mp3)
Dimeadozen.org (torrent FLAC files- need to register)
(If this doesn't work for you, leave a message in the comments and I'll link you to the file)