100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #54 Trashcan Sinatras – Weightlifting

Released: 2004

In a game stuffed full of liars telling their lies the biggest one is always the false piety of “Staying true to you”. If you stay true to you the chances of being abandoned by your audience, forgotten by broadcasters or most likely some new sucker turning up who just does it better than you increase exponentially every year. Staying true to you for 99% of artists equals a career horizon that eventually just gets blotted out.

And yet, every rule is there to be broken. When the Trashcan Sinatras released their first album Obscurity Knocks in 1990, it’s pithy, doorstep poetry wordplay and lush guitar pop was utterly swamped by Madchester and a thousand derivations of it. Regrouping, it’s darker, more complicated 1993 follow up I’ve Seen Everything met the same fate at the hands of grunge. Still ploughing more or less an identical furrow, 1996’s A Happy Pocket went toe to toe with Britpop and disappeared faster than a gram bag in The Good Mixer.

Press on, press on. In the eight years between that and Weightlifting the world changed immeasurably, but the band from Irvine did not. Guided by now familiar principles – craft, meaning, a genuine love for storytelling – the title track of their fourth album was more of the brilliant same, a clear eyed ballad with one hand on hope that seemed like it was only being sung to you. Somebody had to stay true to themselves, so it might as well have been the best body.