Constantines - 'Shine A Light' (Sub Pop)
3/5
By: Tim Dellow
Good looking. We haven't seen them, but you can tell. Self-assured rock swagger pasted on to a high visibility 'outsider' billboard. Just as Bush had the jocks of Middle America accepting their inner grunge tendencies; ('Man, I got dropped from the team and my dad hates me now; how I bleed with Aryan pain...') this crew(cut) from Toronto are latter-day Replacements with an Eddie Vedder growl.
Well they're better than that, actually. Evidently, Sub Pop have started releasing truly decent records again, and following The Rapture, this baby pulls a neat post-punk face (whatever that is) and certainly has conviction.
They're embarrassingly earnest, with an unflinching self-belief that they are part of the cure to the corporate syphilis that continues to buttf**k the 'independent' music industry. Moments of excellence colour the album, like a child prodigy scribbling over his parent's pristinely bland wallpaper with felt-tips pens. This could be viewed in two ways; either - as the press-release suggests, using a dodgy messiah metaphor - that they have resurrected the soul of rock 'n' roll from its acrid corpse or, for the less flowery minded of us, created a perfectly listenable album from the usually stolid college-rock genre.
In other words, the Constantines are in a Constantly Consistent struggle against being average, but are drowned in a sea of complacency. Welcomingly.
Artists in this article: Constantines
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