I’ll never forget the night my brother and I—shitfaced as usual—spent hours trying to break into, rather than out of, Philadelphia’s long-abandoned Eastern Penitentiary. It was, in its way, a typical night back in those days; the two of would seek out the seediest old man bars, where the television stood on a stack of empty beer cases and no one ever ordered one of the jarred pig knuckles, or where you might see a pile of broken furniture in a dim corner, the remnants of some legendary knuckleduster.
I don’t know what any of this has to do with Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs, except that I’m glad they’re around; when I was there, the only two acts Philly was famous for were The Dead Milkmen and The Hooters—a paltry contribution to the national music scene, at best. So I’m happy to call The War on Drugs a Philly band; the city that got such negative attention for Frank Rizzo, one truly badass mob war, and the MOVE abomination deserves all the good bands it can get.
The War on Drugs were formed in Philly by Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile in 2005, with Vile jumping ship after their debut, 2008’s Wagonwheel Blues, to go solo. But Granduciel kept the faith, and The War on Drugs went places. Me, I like all of their work, but hold a special place in my heart for their debut, because it’s snazzy and snappy and puts “Coast Reprise” before “Show Me the Coast,” which makes me unaccountably happy. Both Granduciel and Vile are avowed Dylan devotees, and you can hear echoes, but they’re anything but slavish imitators.
It’s there, for instance, in the punchy “Buenos Aires Beach,” which opens with acoustic guitars and Granduciel singing in a manner that harkens back to Dylan’s glory days. Lyrically he touches base too, singing about boys with sea shells in their eyes and intoning, “So let’s speak of the past/In the future perfect tense/The places we will go/Before we grow up up up up up up up oo awoa.” And it’s there in the harmonica that opens the equally driving “Arms Like Boulders,” which features some very Dylanesque lyrics including the hilarious “Chasing squirrels around your property/Making sure that they know/That this is your kingdom.” Wrap your ears around the sound of the train coming round the bend he tells the subject of the song, and that’s good advice if ever I heard it.
“Taking the Farm” boasts Krautrock propulsion and urgent vocals, and I like it. It features some distorted “sweep guitar” by guest musician Ryan Cobb, some big distorted guitar feedback, and basically takes you around the neighborhood, fast. Granduciel is “chopping down treetops, tree after tree,” while the band picks up volume and makes us all grateful for the invention of amplifiers. Meanwhile, “A Needle in Your Eye #16” opens with some mighty drum bash and travels via one uber-cool organ to the autobahn, where all the instruments are distorted and Granduciel sings about jet planes and midnight trains and a wagonwheel which he rode with a monkey on his back. Is the organ a Wurlitzer? I wish I could tell you. All I know is that it, a harmonica, and some Springsteen-heavy drums collaborate to produce the perfect noise.
“There Is No Urgency” opens on an ambient note, but quickly redeems itself with its stagger step melody and cool lyrics. The keyboards are tres hip, ditto Granduciel’s, “Cuz there’s trouble down here/There’s trouble down there/There’s trouble everywhere/Don’t you know?” He sings of mental reconnections but concludes, “There is no need/There is no need/There is no urgency” while all manner of musical brouhaha, all of it great if not synthesized and/or sampled, goes on behind him. Take the trumpet. There is no trumpet. I like the trumpet but it’s not a trumpet. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but I know I love this song, and that’s all I need to know.
My only misgiving about Wagonwheel Blues resides in the ambient (read boring) tune “Reverse the Charges.” Let me tell you, that Brian Eno guy has a lot to answer for, and I would love to give him a good talking to. The song sounds exactly like every other piece of ambient bullshit I’ve ever listened to, and I suspect it’s the sound I’ll hear when I die and am sent to Hell. “Coast Reprise,” on the other hand, shows early signs of being a bore, but a nice little melody rises up from the depths to turn it, if not into the greatest song in the land, the kind of song I would like to listen to on acid as the sun comes up. Has a nice groove to it, it does.
The long-winded “Show Me the Coast” throws a lot of guitars together while Granduciel sounds more like Dylan than he does anywhere else on the LP. It’s got a nice melody, this one, and Granduciel sings in his chains like the sea. Meanwhile the song goes on and on, gradually building momentum, as Granduciel drops out but the musicians continue to add chord to chord like bricklayers building a temple made out of sound. Album closer “Barrel of Batteries” is a lo-fi tune with strummed acoustic guitar, and it charges along in its low-key way like the Energizer Bunny, with Granduciel singing that he’s a barrel of batteries and she wants to hear more. There’s ice on the floor, whatever that means, but it doesn’t really matter; this tune is sweet on the ears even if it doesn’t make a jot of sense.
The War on Drugs continued on after Vile’s departure because it was Granduciel who was doing all the heavy lifting; he wrote all the songs with Vile helping out on only three, he did the singing, and while he may have yet to write a song as sublimely perfect as Vile’s “Freeway,” I have no doubt he has it in him. So far as I’m concerned, as an ex-Philadelphian, everything ended for the best. Frank Rizzo’s dead, the Mob is quiet, and the Philadelphia police haven’t bombed an entire neighborhood in years, and Philly now has two great bands where before it only had one. And I’ll be a drunken Mummer if that isn’t a wonderful, wonderful thing.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
