Far be it for us to believe the stuff music journalists make up, but the standard description of The Constantines – Fugazi meet Springsteen – is a useful place to start with this Ontario quartet. "The Constantines" originally surfaced in Canada back in 2001, but only arrives on this side of the Atlantic in the wake of their second album, the very fine "Shine A Light".
Like its successor, it showcases a muscular, sweat-stained and intense band who mix underground punk with a sort of horny-handed guy rock, pitched halfway between the heavy industrial part of town and the university campus. The Fugazi obsession is easy to spot on songs like "Young Offenders": tumbling drums and churning bass locked together; clean, drilled riffs; hoarsely barked vocals from Bryan Webb.
But while so many bands influenced by DC hardcore – the entire emo movement, most conspicuously – are whingeing and often tiresomely vulnerable, The Constantines are refreshingly fierce. Apologies aren't really part of their vocabulary. Calls to arms, both impassioned and ironic, most definitely are. "We want the death of rock'n'roll," Webb argues forcefully on the opening "Arizona", railing against cliché and empty gesture.
Of course, one suspects Webb understands that his band have actually manoeuvred hardcore closer to trad rock's manly tradition in a way that would disgust many of their contemporaries. But The Constantines' aggression is always controlled and targeted, and Webb is far too smart and poetically ambitious to resort to testosterone bluster: on the acoustic sketch of "St You" he even strikingly resembles Mark Eitzel. Consequently both Constantines albums, for all those hints of Springsteen and rock orthodoxy, sound oddly subversive in the context of emo's mewling blandness.
Start with "Shine A Light" (for the punchier anthems "National Hum" and "Nighttime Anytime"), then work backwards to this taut, frequently gripping debut.
