Men Of Constantine Sorrow? | The band’s Too Slow for Love EP recasts their older material in a mellower form.
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CONSTANTINES
w/ The Weakerthans and Oh Susanna. Winspear Centre (#4 Sir Winston Churchill Square). Thu, Apr 23 (7:30pm). Tickets: $30, available through www.winspearcentre.com.
This year marks the decade anniversary for Canadian indie rock stalwarts Constantines. In that time they’ve amassed four albums’ worth of raucous, swaggering material — just don’t expect them to remember all of it.
“I’d say that we could nail 20 [songs], easy,” says guitarist/vocalist Steve Lambke over the phone from his home in Montreal. “We could probably nail 30. And then after that, the quality might start to diminish a little bit.” He laughs. “Our old age memories might start to let us down. We might have to ask for a time out to go backstage and hash it out.”
In addition to their high-energy live show, Lambke and his bandmates are renowned for how often they tour, having already traversed all of North America once in promotion of their most recent album, 2008’s Kensington Heights. Their current string of Canadian dates coincides with the release of a new digital EP, Too Slow for Love, which features stripped-down versions of Constantines songs from throughout the group’s career. (You can get a deluxe edition of Kensington Heights, including the new EP, for just $5.99 on iTunes.)
“Back in the fall, we were doing this tour with the David Suzuki Foundation, where we played a few campuses across Ontario,” Lambke says. “They were afternoon shows, and there were speakers talking about energy conservation, not using bottled water — some of the simpler things that individuals can do to effect environmental change. Part of the way they were trying to get people out to these events was to have bands play. We didn’t want to do a raucous punk rock set in that context, so we worked out a few quieter, or maybe more palatable versions of some of our songs. And that’s essentially the set that we ended up recording for Too Slow for Love.”
Lambke admits the new EP may be a sign that the group is maturing, perhaps inevitably, after 10 years of playing together. But he’s also quick to remind me that Constantines have always tried to be more than a one-trick pony.
“We still really love playing loud punk rock and running around and getting sweaty, for sure,” he says. “But we do like to do other things as well. I guess there was an attempt [with Too Slow for Love] to show that we’re maybe more versatile than some people think we are. But the people that like our band know that we’ve always done those other things and included those other kinds of songs on our records.”
That cryptic nod to “some people” is a reference to a recurring criticism I brought up earlier from some reviews of Kensington Heights — namely, that the band’s once-jarring sound had now become overly familiar, and that their records were no longer surprising. Lambke is somewhat sympathetic to this viewpoint (“Obviously the first time you hear something, it’s fresher than the 10th time”), but he won’t be calling an emergency band meeting to address it anytime soon.
“We’re trying to write songs, is the thing,” he says. “As much as we like sounds, using guitar tones and keyboard sounds, the central idea has always been about writing songs. Whether our sound has changed or not, all that stuff ... it’s almost beside the point. I think we’re writing better songs than we used to write. It’s a tough question, because it’s also hard not to get defensive and be like, ‘Fuck you.’”
Still, expletives aside, he’s able to find a pretty good silver lining.
“In a way,” he says, “that [complaint] is just an indication that we have achieved some kind of recognition — that people have heard us before.”
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