weightlifting album review

the sunday herald

november 7, 2004

Trashcan Sinatras - Weightlifting

Picnic Records

Rating: ****

Some bands make a virtue of their perennial outsider status, declaring that the margins are a far more interesting place to hang out. Others are simply sidelined, striving for commercial success, but never really getting there. Such is the case with the Trashcan Sinatras.

Not that it's their fault. Since their debut single in 1990, the wry Obscurity Knocks (too prophetic a title for some fans), they're a band whose sweet, sardnic songs have been met with public indifference and record company wrangling (this is their first album in eight years, after a bitter falling out with their previous label, Go!Discs).

Like their contemporaries, Teenage Fanclub (whose Norman Blake turns up on Got Carried Away), the Trashcan Sinatras are a band who excel at the sad-eyed pop song; even when the guitars of opening track Welcome Back sing, there's a melancholic streak there.

The title track's exhortation to "leave it behind, a great weight lifting" suggest a slacker's manifesto, a plea not to get bogged down in quotidian stresses, the wise words of a band who have seen the petty excesses and wrangling of the record industry up close. that they've climbed out of the cesspit is reason alone to salute them; that they've done it with an album as gorgeous as this is a bonus.

Originally appeared in The Sunday Herald.