An all-star tribute to the Constantines from 2014

Feist, The Hold Steady, Japandroids, Broken Social Scene, Death From Above 1979, Owen Pallett, and others bear witness to the Ontario indie-rock legends' life-changing powers

Jun 20, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

As of today, stübermania is officially one year old! Thank you to everyone who’s subscribed, shared, commented, emailed, hearted, reposted, linked, sent me a nice text, listed me in your Recommendations, told a friend, shouted out the newsletter on your radio show, clicked on one of my playlists, given a post a passing glance before shuffling it into a READ LATER folder that never gets opened, pasted one of my interviews wholesale into your blog with the attribution buried at the end, or done anything else to assure me this newsletter isn’t being blasted out into the void each week. In lieu of marking my first anniversary with an expensive, taxpayer-funded tank parade that no one asked for, I hereby present the five most-read posts from the past year (based on hard internal data, which actually differs from what the Most Popular list on my Substack homepage might lead you to believe):
This week in the Toronto Star, I informed readers of how you can see Waxahatchee, Iron & Wine, Femi Kuti, The Weather Station, Tune-Yards, and other notable acts this summer—provided you’re willing to road-trip it. Here’s my guide to summer music festivals in Southern Ontario.
Coming on the heels of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson’s deaths, the passing of Steve Leckie on June 12 didn’t attract anywhere near the same degree of press attention, but in the context of early Toronto punk history, his legend looms just as large. A devout student of Iggy Pop’s chest-slashing nihilist theatre, Leckie and his band The Viletones never achieved the international infamy of fellow first-wave punk acts like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. However, their long list of hall-of-famer fans—from Henry Rollins to Bad Brains to Ian Mackaye to Bob Mould to Nirvana to Fucked Up—speaks to an enduring influence that’s reverberated through successive generations of punks. Leckie was 67; here he is in his self-mutilating prime circa 1977:

There’s a funny scene in the Tragically Hip docuseries No Dress Rehearsal where the band members admit to feeling anxious about frontman Gord Downie recording his first solo album, Coke Machine Glow, in 2001, and what it could mean for the future of the band. But then after hearing the record, guitarist Rob Baker quipped, “Well, that’s not his meal ticket—he’s stuck with us if he wants to pay the bills!” Which is to say, Coke Machine Glow’s art-folk lullabies were far too idiosyncratic to ever compete with the Hip’s arena-rock horsepower—and that was thanks in large part to Downie’s chosen backing band for the record, Toronto avant-rock trio The Dinner Is Ruined. Fronted by seasoned producer Dale Morningstar (who I’ve always thought of as the Canadian underground answer to Mike Watt when it comes to sage wisdom and blue-collar bonhomie), The Dinner Is Ruined were rustic and ramshackle enough to get invited to folk festivals but noisy and freaky enough to have opened shows for Sonic Youth. The group hasn’t released a new album in 20 years, but Morningstar, drummer Dave Clark, and bassist/keyboardist Dr. Johnny Pee occasionally reconvene for live shows—like last Sunday’s appearance at The Bright Room in Hamilton, where they reaffirmed their commitment to keeping Canada weird after 30-plus years in the game.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox—including some tracks from slightly older albums I’m getting caught up on now that mid-year list-making season is upon us:

Click here for the Apple Music version

The Dears, “Babe, We’ll Find a Way”: When they opened for Metric two weeks ago at the Budweiser Stage, The Dears performed in front of a projection that read “Est. 1995,” which is a succinct way of saying: “we’ve been doing this a long time and we’re not stopping anytime soon.” And given that Murray Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak have kept their creative and romantic partnership intact through three decades of personnel shuffles, label changes, and shifting industry tides, this sprightly comeback single (which slots nicely next to “Don’t Lose the Faith” in the jangly end of their repertoire) feels like a renewal of vows, both for them and the band itself.
Gelli Haha, “Spit”: This L.A. (via Boise!) art-pop upstart follows the Moroder-to-Daft Punk-to-LCD pipeline into strobe-lit electro-disco sensory overload.
Hotline TNT, “The Scene”: Will Anderson’s fuzz brigade spends much of their new record, Raspberry Moon, camped out in the Venn diagram intersection of shoegaze and power-pop that Teenage Fanclub vacated after Bandwagonesque, but on this beast of a track, they amplify both the muscular and psychedelic qualities of their sound, like Kevin Parker remaking You’re Living All Over Me.
Ribbon Skirt, “Off Rez”: For me, the reveal of the Polaris long list is the most exciting part of the whole prize process, because you get to see where critical consensus is forming around the fringes. It also provides a motivational nudge to retrieve some records that got lost in the inbox shuffle—like Bite Down, the debut album from this Montreal group, who apply barb-wired ‘90s indie-rock aesthetics to acerbic observations on Indigenous identity in a world where Buffy is no longer seen as a saint.
BAMBII feat. Aluna, “Island Criminal”: Speaking of Polaris—this 2024 shortlist contender just dropped Infinity Club II, the star-studded sequel to her debut EP of basement-rave bangers. On this heart-racing highlight, BAMBII hitches the AlunaGeorge vocalist to a delirious drum ‘n’ bass beat that feels like it’s being blasted out of a confetti cannon.
Mae Martin, “Brought Me Round”: Often, when comedians present themselves as serious songwriters, you can still sense their tongue circling around their cheek in wry Randy Newman fashion. But Martin’s recent musical debut, I’m a TV (which is being re-released today with bonus tracks), bears no evidence that they tell jokes for a living, as they nestle into a style of dreamy indie-pop that, on this track, transports them into Moon Safari’s orbit.

THE HEADLINER:
An all-star tribute to Constantines

Publication: The Grid

Publication date: June 5, 2014

Show being promoted: Constantines’ first proper concert in four years at the Field Trip festival in Toronto (though they technically played a warm-up gig in their former homebase of Guelph two nights before).

The context: During their initial 2000-2010 run, the Constantines were the unofficial house band for a pre-Rob Ford Toronto, a group that channeled the empty-pocket anxiety and full-blooded communalism of downtown living into powerful but poetic rock ‘n’ roll. Four years ago at Stereogum, I detailed my personal history with the band. TL;DR version: I fucking love the Constantines and have since the very first time I saw them in February 2001, after which I wrote this article on them for Eye Weekly and then pretty much turned the magazine into the Constantines’ unofficial propaganda arm for the next few years. I was especially stoked to have them on our cover in October 2003, when we modelled them after another band of young offenders:

Funnily enough, I began that 2003 cover story with a premonition of the Constantines celebrating their 25th anniversary in the year 2025 with “a four-CD box set, accompanying hand-bound coffee-table book, and five-part CBC documentary.” One can still dream. But while the Cons never grew popular enough to fill arenas, they had a profound influence on artists who have. So in advance of the band’s 2014 reunion show at Field Trip—and the vinyl reissue of their totemic 2003 release, Shine a Light—I asked some of their more notable fans to testify:

Feist: “The Constantines are a world-class, unimpeachable, incredible rock band. They’re an institution that I’ve always observed with a kind of fear and intimidation from a distance. For years, during my solo section in ‘Sea-Lion Woman,’ I put the riff for [the Shine a Light single] ‘Nighttime/Anytime’ in there because I felt the six people in the audience at the Air Canada Centre who got it would think, ‘Why the fuck is she playing a Cons riff in the middle of her show?’ And I was like, ‘I really hope that some people hear this and get it!’ ‘Young Lions’ is another of my favorites. The first time I spent a long time with that record, I was in the Canary Islands over Christmas, and I was on this volcanic island, and I rented a car and I went and found a volcano to go climb, and I remember having the headphones on and it being this hazy day, and I was a climbing a fucking volcano, and there’s no vegetation around, there’s just this porous sharp rock and this incline… and I’m listening to ‘Young Lions’ full blast on my headphones, climbing a volcano off the shores of Africa, and thinking, ‘I am the video for this song!’”

Owen Pallett: “Considering they were and are one of the best bands to have come out of Canada—and one of my endless favourites, with consistently great shows—the strongest memories I have of them are when, like, they fucked it up. When a band member was too fucked up to play, or when pianet-met-drum kit and the show got cut short, or that period in 2006 where they were still working out their latter-day sound and they started playing jammy sets and I, like the idiot I am, drunkenly told [keyboardist] Whil [Kidman] that I liked them better as Springsteen-meets-Fugazi than Springsteen-meets-The Band. But, I mean, that was part of their appeal, their pockmarks. The [Steve] Lambke-shouted songs—best second-vocalist ever!; the slowdown into ‘can I get witness?’ on 'Young Offenders.’ My favourite song of theirs is and will always be 'Draw Us Lines’: no chord changes, angular nonsense melody, pure pummelling fucked-up perfection. I don’t like to romanticize ‘busted living’ a la Robert Mapplethorpe, but the feeling with these guys was that they didn’t like to romanticize it either. Their music was a window, you know? [They were an] enormous inspiration, lyrically. Ten-dollar words tumble out of Bry [Webb]’s mouth like no problem—he sings it slanted, but effortlessly. All my other favourite post-hardcore bands—Rockets Red Glare, Fugazi, Polvo?—they used ten-dollar words in a way that was dividing in a confrontational sort of way, a challenge. Bry’s lyrics scream with a need to communicate, to get his point across. I don’t want to point out any specific correlations between my stuff and his, because that’d be embarrassing for both of us, but he definitely gave me confidence to sing words like ‘concatenation’ and ‘obscurantism’ when they were the right words.”

Craig Finn of The Hold Steady: “The Hold Steady did a massive North American tour with the Constantines [in 2005]. I loved watching them every night as they had everything I wanted in a rock ‘n’ roll band. They had great songs, and a serious work ethic onstage and off. They were tough but musical. Their show was well-oiled and paced just right. By the end of every set they played, I felt bulletproof and amazing. They made me believe in rock ‘n’ roll and fall in love with it again and again.”

Alex Edkins of Metz: “‘Nighttime/Anytime’ gives me shivers. It is the sound of a band at the height of its powers. Music for the soul. Devoid of pretense. Genre-defying. Beautiful. Heavy. Honest. The Constantines were one of the first bands in Toronto to get behind Metz. To share the stage with them was an honour and a privilege.”

Sebastian Grainger of Death From Above 1979: “The first time I saw the Constantines was when [Grainger and Jesse Keeler’s pre-DFA79 band] Femme Fatale played with them at a YMCA in Oakville, I believe it was. I was most impressed by [drummer] Doug [MacGregor]’s playing and the fact that he was wearing a vintage Metallica t-shirt, which at the time wasn’t cool. The next time I saw them was a few years later at South by Southwest, standing in the middle of a packed Emo’s. Their conviction was always so powerful. Why did they break up? Breaking up is overrated.”

Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene: “I remember seeing them in Soundscapes before Shine a Light came out, and just standing there thinking, ‘This band is powerful.’ It was like being in a tiny library watching this band pound it out. We were part of this scene growing out of the city, and I remember we ran into them at a gas station somewhere in the state of New York—we pulled in up in our van and they were already there with theirs—and we just looked at each other like, ‘Yep, we’re doing it!’ Which was cool. I got to see them at one of my favourite clubs, the 40 Watt Club in Minneapolis, and they were opening for Hold Steady, and we were [in town] because we were playing the next night. It’s always amazing when you see bands from your city in other towns and watching the people react to it. They were definitely a band who, when we were out on the road, people would always talk about them, like, ‘Oh yeah… the Cons…’”

Tim Kingsbury of Arcade Fire: “I’m really happy that the Cons are playing again and I can’t wait to see them. I’ve always loved their combination of thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and brute force—they do it so well. Some of Arcade Fire’s first shows outside of Montreal were with them, which was a very fun time for us. We loved playing with them and seeing them and they left their mark on us, no doubt. We originally covered ‘Young Lions’ when we played Lee’s Palace 10 years ago, because we loved it. On [the current Reflektor] tour, we’ve been learning a cover for most of the shows by a band or singer from whatever city we’re in and playing it at the show. ‘Young Lions’ was the obvious choice for Toronto.”

Brian King of Japandroids: “Before we saw the Constantines, [Japandroids drummer] Dave [Prowse] and I just enjoyed going to shows. But seeing the Constanines was what planted the seed of us actually wanting to play music ourselves. They remain one of the most influential bands for both of us, because those Constantines shows we saw together, when we first started hanging out, always represented what we wanted our band to be like or what we wanted to achieve some day. Dave and I started a band with the idea of wanting to do what the Constantines do—not exactly, but with that spirit, and the intensity that they played with, and the emotion that they played with. Because, being in the audience, we knew what that did to the people who were at the show. It wasn’t just another show that you went to—you came out of the show feeling a certain way, talking about the show, going home and immediately listening to the records. It was a very intense and very personal experience. And that’s one of the things we’ve always strived to do in our shows.”

ENCORES

Since the article above was published in The Grid 11 years ago, the Cons have been playing an extremely protracted game of “how long can we remain inactive without officially breaking up?” That Field Trip show was followed by a steady stream of reunion-tour dates over the 2014-15 and then, during a brief Southern Ontario club jaunt in 2018, they actually played three new songs. But they haven’t played a show since. One of those unreleased songs, “Call Me Out,” surfaced in 2020 as a Black Lives Matter benefit single, however, at this point, the much-desired follow-up to 2008’s Kensington Heights has officially entered Chinese Democracy/mbv territory, if it ever materializes at all.
That said, the band’s state of perpetual hiatus makes a lot more sense when you consider that principal songwriters Bry Webb and Steve Lambke are currently making music that’s much more quiet and contemplative than the Cons’ soul-punk onslaught. Webb released his most recent set of dust-covered hymns, Run With Me, in 2023 and tours semi-regularly in stripped-down duo formation with his partner Steph Yates, a.k.a. COTS, while Lambke—co-proprietor of the essential indie label You’ve Changed Records—just released Friendship Traces, an album of pawn-shop post-rock instrumentals recorded with “Shotgun” Jimmie Kilpatrick.