Weekly Release Spotlight: The War on Drugs
Posted on 7/21/2008
The War on Drugs
Wagonwheel Blues
[Secretly Canadian]
With a pharmacological reference in their band name, a debut album title that recalls two kinds of antiquities, and the burst of reverent harmonica tearing through the first few seconds of their opening track "Arms Like Boulders," it seems we are given another band wishing they were remnants of a freer and simpler time long before their births. Joke's on us, it turns out, because Philadelphia's The War On Drugs and their first offering to the retro-guzzling public is anything but trite or redundant, both in the variety of genuine feeling and instrumentation they cram into their nine tracks of swirling and dirty Americana. The throaty vocalist and guitar affecting duo of Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile, whose backing band is equally essential to the songs' striking vigor, don't just update the blue collar rock that has repopularized itself in the hipster circuit, they swallow it whole, letting their true selves become the new conduit for the subgenre's urgent cries for national direction and comfort.
Smarter than your average rustic tone enthusiasts, the workaday everymen in charge of The War On Drugs caught the attention of Secretly Canadian with a self-released download-only EP called Barrel of Batteries (also the name of the full-length's no frills acoustic closing track) just last year. Smarter than average because the label is exactly the place where the work of artists like Granduciel and Vile belongs: they now sit aside Magnolia Electric Co.'s distinguished and hushed version of the much-maligned genre of alt-country and Bodies Of Water's choral and dramatic rendition of 60s pop. Add a bed of blinking guitar pedal lights and you have yourself the core of The War On Drugs' sound - like a pasty city boy lost in the middle of a sun-drenched yellow farming field, whose heart had always yearned for nature but never truly encountered it.
Wagonwheel's percussion and chin-up attitude capably manufacture this unadorned country landscape of chugging (images of both beer and trains come to mind simultaneously) the proverbial engine through the night and day, never stopping and always moving toward an undecided destination. Meanwhile, invisible and completely inborn trimmings like the sooty organ on "Needle in Your Eye #16" or the sing-song delay pedal on "Buenos Aires Beach" keep the cityscape soul firmly implanted in the newfound plains of acoustic folk and bar band casualness. And for every time the wagonwheel complacently turns without stepping forward an inch (the 10-minute anti-epic "Show Me The Coast,"), there's a spacious cathartic release (the ambient instrumental "Reverse The Charges") that succeeds at displaying both the outer edges of the duo's abilities and the inner slow-breathing meditations that caused all their dreams of the past and nightmares of today-influenced ruckus that the disc begins with.
Stream: The War on Drugs - Taking the Farm
Written by Chris Polley, Radio K volunteer and host of Now Like Photographs.