Shine a Light, Nate

Goddamn fucking 5 pukes out of 5 possible pukes, is the first thing. I tell Joe this a lot that I wish someone would shit on one of these albums, just be an absolute shitheel about how the pick sucked and I sucked for making it. Maybe this week will be the week, because this is the one I would have the hardest time getting over.

"National Hum" isn't that great of a song. Sure, it establishes the band's punk bonafides right off the jump and it makes for an easy welcome for anyone who might only be coming to the band for the post-hardcore part of their equation, but those same definitions also limit it. Which is a shame because what resonates on this album the first time or the 500th time you listen to it is the idea of boundlessness, of freedom. A shame to be put into a box right from the jump.

This is going to be one of those review where I just riff on shit for a while, so I'm sure it'll ring Joe's bell and potentially cause Sunny or Pam to raise an eyebrow and for everyone else I will willingly accept my screenshot of the "I ain't reading all that" meme with warmth and understanding. The fact of the matter is that it wasn't until I was driving home from dropping my kids off at daycare this morning playing "Insectivora" at a volume that would cause a sane person to blush with self-consciousness at a stoplight that I finally realized what I liked about this album and what made me keep returning to it for damn near 20 years.

Closer to eighteen years, really. I didn't get into the Constantines until late 2005 / early 2006, when my college roommate James and my tall friend Gilson went to see the Constantines open for the Hold Steady at the Mighty North Star Bar (god rest its soul and its pool table, may the sprawling mixed-use cheapshit faux-industrial rowhome complex that now takes it place be forever haunted by guitar feedback and the sound of a cueball clattering to a bar floor), and I was given a copy of the Constantines' self-titled debut as a consolation gift. That record didn't click for me right away, though I remember "The McKnight Life" and "Young Offenders" sticking out at the time.

More importantly, though, is the fact that I am certain that Hold Steady / Constantines show, coming right after the Cons had released their third and second-best album Tournament of Hearts, and not too long after the Hold Stead released its second and second-best album Separation Sunday, that show could have healed me and improved me in all the ways that evade me now. I've attended some pretty great rock shows, not to brag, but this one stands above them all as the near-miss to end all near-misses as least as far as my own personal mythology and development go. The joke of course is that I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it then the way I appreciate it now, and had I seen that show that night with my two too tall dudes, I would have guzzled beers during the Cons and acted like a complete horse's ass during the quiet parts of "Don't Let Me Explode." I did end up seeing the Cons at Lollapalooza a few years later, right around the time they called it quits. Their set was a shit-kicker, but it was shit-kicker played on a mid-afternoon side stage for 40 minutes, and this is nightclub music for damn sure. 

The funny thing here is that two things that are certain in my bones about this album and this band and its songs are that 1) their music is night club music meant to be listened to in the dark or in a car or god willing performed live in a room pressed together with bodies. You can also listen to it while you're driving home from dropping your kids off, sure, but this is not music that invokes the bright shining sun as much as it does the way skin looks when flashlight light is reflecting off of it, or when neon lights up a person's eyes to make them look like an alien from The Fifth Element. The texture of these songs is steel, concrete, sneakers slapping asphalt right before the glass breaks, the warm silence of stepping out for a cigarette covered in sweat, the momentum of being up to something. It isn't criminal music, but it's a less wholesome kind of fun, the kind of fun people have between 11:30 PM and 2 AM, but not after. It's not X-rated, but you wouldn't give it to a kid in middle school either.

So all that said, all that late-night urban allegory up there a few sentences ago, that's the first true thing. The second true thing about the songs on this album is that they see youth as a feral, natural object that cannot be boxed or controlled and that it's natural state is community. Youth is a knotted fist of weeds cropping up and around a sandy patch in the yard, it's foxes and squirrels speeding through a garden taking what isn't meant for them. It grows bright green from the ashes of wildfires, it pours from the sky in a speed or a quality too strong to be channeled into the sewers, backing up roads and clogging basements in its own celebration. Youth is not a state of mind as much it is a state of nature, and it is not as much attached to age as it is to the sparse, indefinable idea of spirit. They sing about being young with a reverence that only devout servants of a higher power possess.

Something fun about this album is how chock-a-block loaded it is with the kind of "means nothing / means everything" platitudes that comes standard to this kind of vaguely positive, vaguely young rock music. There are lyrics on here that read preposterously on paper, and there are lyrics on here that read like poetry from the core of the dirtbag's loving heart, and those lyrics are often exactly the same depending on the variables (what time of day one listens to the song, how many beers one has had when the song is playing, if one is driving a car with the window down at time of hearing, so on and so forth). Writing that either makes for a tattoo or an incredibly regretful tattoo. "The city is a sister / the nighttime is a lover." "Make your love too wild for words." "We may never be angels but we're lousy with the spirit." "They'll pin your renegade heart to the wall and leave it there to hang." "I was a late breaking back alley mistake howling at the moon." It's okay to recognize these statements both as totems of power and keys of ancient truth, and as "Live Laugh Love" signs for people with tinnitus.

But the fucking trick of it is that they mean it so straight-faced and so detached from irony. The sincerity of the thing can bowl you over if you let. And I have let it, over and over again, for eighteen years, and in that time with this record, I have come to believe that there is no such thing as being too old or too broken, that there is such a thing as being beyond salvation or beyond healing. Because so much of this record is about healing, about community, about perseverance. It's about eating bugs to stay alive, recognizing that the act of staying alive is its own defense and rebellion. It's about finding a temporary one-night family in the ragged hands of the night. It's about how there is a place for you everywhere, wherever you are, if you are looking for it and not too discerning about what you find. Wild ones, diamond girls, shaking wrists.

It's tempting to call this a masculine album, especially since Bry Webb has a gravely voice and so many of the album's best moments musically have a kind of Dudes Rock guitar bro mentality, and perhaps this is an overly charitable reading of the text but I hear Shine a Light as an almost starkly genderless album. Every song is narration and observation with little time spent on too much first-person exploration which lets you pour yourself into it if you want to, and what you pour yourself into are ideas that fly in the face of masculinity as we understand it: love and communion divorced from sex or domination, community and defiance against a broad idea of things that work the keep the natural animal force of youth down, not specific people or institutions. I would like to think anyone could hear themselves in these songs, but maybe Pam or Rachel or Maeve can tell me otherwise. Still, so much music of the time by dudes was so gross and so singular in its understanding of what gender expression looked like, to hear these five grown boys make music about larger ideas, about the dichotomy of the urban and the natural, about love and friendship as their own pursuits divorced from intergender power and struggle, it's a neat thing. 

Boy, that's a lot of lofty, ill-defined signifying, isn't it? Let's turn the temperature down a bit. "Young Lions" is the closest thing to a hit this album has, but "On to You" is the towering achievement, a song so complete in outlining the band's message and what it can do musically that it's almost hard to believe there's more record after it. Put that one onto the golden disc and send out to space, the one that we should give the aliens to explain what it feels like to love guitars, to love being in love. Goddamn man. "They say love is only trouble and we're both too drunk to steer it." That's a fucking short story right there, a text delivered with a passion that suggests its opposite. That's messenger and message, sign and signifier, that's being fourteen and coming home from your first day, and that's being married for ten years and having a dinner on the beach. "Scoundrel Babies" stinks a little bit, but it stinks in the same way "National Hum" does, failure by not being the best song I've ever heard. "Shine a Light," "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)," and "Insectivora" are the three best songs on the album to run to. The more I listen to this thing the more I hear "Sub-Domestic" as a powerhouse and as a prelude to the somewhat slower, somewhat less frenetic future the band would settle into. "Tank Commander (Hung Up in a Warehouse Town)" is a fantastic intersection of "make a song that sounds like Fugazi but name it like something off Darkness on the Edge of Town." A cool dynamic on this record is how the vocals and the music are never really quite exploding at the same time. Webb does most of the exploding on "Tank Commander," and the band does the blowing up on "Insectivora." They both do the blowing up on "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)." Makes me wish more post-punk was like this.

Boy, sure feels like I should wrap this thing up, huh? Well, let's go with this: Our lives are natural things springing from a pure collective beginning that we do not understand will never comprehend, but we can in moments of grace recognize things reaching out from that shared center to bind us together, to remind us that we are the same and that we want the same things. Here is Shine a Light, one of the sacred texts. I hope you listened to it and found a piece of yourself in it, because if so, you found a piece of me too, and we can see each other now. I cannot always look at someone straight-faced and tell them to make their love too wild for words, but this record reminds me that if I could and if you could hear it, maybe we'd all be better off. If sanctuary still exists, it's in this fucking record and records like this and in you and I listening to it. This, I guess, in my own roundabout way driving home from taking my kids to school, is what I love about the album, how open-hearted it is, and how in its 40-minute runtime I can be openhearted, too. What a nice idea, what a beautiful fiction, what a world alight.