There’s trouble down on 12th Street

I know, I’m pretty much the last one on this bandwagon. Sam Roberts‘s third full-length, Love at the End of the World, was released close to a year ago, and its second single, “Detroit ’67,” hit YouTube in October. Sam Roberts has always struck me as the successor to the Tragically Hip and Sloan: mainstream Canadian meat-and-potatoes rock that doesn’t totally suck. It’s not perhaps the most adventurous music in the world, but it’s an excellent way to start weaning pre-teens off of mall punk and onto less prefabricated music.

“Detroit ’67,” however, serves a much greater purpose. The song is based around a pounding honky tonk piano riff and Roberts’ enigmatic, swaggering vocal performance. With bluesy guitar leads and a massive shout-along chorus, it sounds like something the Rolling Stones would have written in, uh, ’67. The title suggests that the song is about Detroit’s 1967 race riots, but its actual scope is much broader. It comes off more like a series of free-association references to the city, from the auto industry to Motown to the seedy back streets. The song traces Detroit’s history across multiple eras, from pre-European Chippewa settlements to the present day. Although his perspective continually shifts, it always returns to the chorus’s question: “Does anyone here tonight remember those times? Can anyone here tonight just tell me what they felt like?”

The video is a perfect visual representation of the song, with grainy historical clips set against modern day footage of Sam Roberts and his band/posse/ entourage walking around Detroit. Interspersed are shots of Roberts pounding back shots in a pub and leading drunken sing-alongs—naturally, since “Detroit ’67” is a quintessential bar blues song.

Love at the End of the World won the Juno for best rock album of the year. That’s a bit of a dubious honour, but congratulations I guess. It was released last May via Universal.