The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding
Tiny Mix Tapes 90
The War on Drugs
A Deeper Understanding
[Atlantic; 2017]
Rating: 4.5/5
It’s a rare moment when one hears something so inspired that they’re awoken from the narcotic somnolence of their typical music-listening routine, a half-awake state penetrated by no words or guitar solos, only a vague notion of the volume, feeling, and texture of what’s being heard. Listening to The War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding produces such a moment, one of breaking through the misty purgatory of half-commitments and partially-realized emotions, right on through to the realm of the essential forces that drive us, a place where fear and desire live as permanent neighbors. This record is a shimmering case study of the iron grip that melancholy has on the heavy soul that wants desperately to accept love. Beyond their meteoric guitar solos, exploding-heart drums, and silvery synths, The War on Drugs always lead us back to that familiar moment that we all know: the paralyzing convergence of passion and anxiety. This moment unfolds over the course of A Deeper Understanding and is guided by a new paradigm in the band’s collaborative powers, especially regarding the interplay of vocals, instrumental layering, and solos. As soon as the needle is dropped, we are pulled with a swift elegance back into the hazy incandescence of Adam Granduciel’s mind.
“The truth is in the dark,” Granduciel sings through the foggy reverb and cascading piano of “In Chains;” proceeding in axiom from the album’s artwork, where the singer works alone in his studio, his illuminated face and keyboard giving balance to the darkness that enshrouds him and vice versa, his words ring true. Their earlier albums were more personal projects, conceived mostly alone in dark rooms, great songs struggling to find their way toward richly realized collaborations; on their fourth, The War on Drugs has become a fully synergetic band. This development has allowed their music a new kind of movement, which has resulted in songs more fleshed-out and actualized than even those from their great 2014 release, Lost in the Dream.
The songs on A Deeper Understanding are often held together through the cooperation of individual motifs and ideas. On “Thinking of a Place,” the delicate union of sounds makes every second of its 11 minutes captivating. Individual lines weave in and out, sometimes overtaking one another, while other lines provide static foundations that allow the song to move forward. An organ emerges and then gives way to an electric guitar, which evaporates into a pedal steel that underscores Granduciel’s chorus. He sings, “And I’m thinking of a place/ And it feels so very real/ Just moving through the dark.” His words gracefully fade away into an extended, breezy guitar solo that somehow grasps the song’s imagery of the Missouri River in the distance, light changing on its water. Similarly, “Strangest Thing” takes the space it needs at every turn, guitars breathing and exhaling into the ethereal sighs of synths, pianos, and backing vocals. The song gradually crescendos, eventually reaching a feedback-tinged guitar solo.
The musical centerpieces of many of these songs are their nimble, beautiful solos. Historically, solos are meant to be statements of freedom, the musician reifying his or her creative spirit through an improvisation that bridges technique and vision. Especially in jazz and jam music, extended soloing is often sandwiched between repetitive song structures that, in some ways, throw into crisis the freedom purportedly achieved in the solo. In rock music, an instrumental break typically (but not always) falls in the last third of a song, before the final statement of the song’s themes, usually as another chorus or a coda. In The War on Drugs’ music, however, guitar solos often come across as the opposite: well-integrated interjections that don’t disrupt, but, rather, extend the style and flow of the song. This is because their solos tend to elongate a critical observation made in the lyrics. In the album’s upbeat, 1980s-infected opener “Up All Night,” Granduciel laments his struggle to fully commit to his relationship, singing about his paranoia, “It’s not some feeling I can break/ I keep raising up my/ I keep raising up my/ It’s not some feeling I can shake.” This reflection gives way to a desolate voice towering above all others: a distorted guitar, its minute-and-a-half solo a neon howl of loneliness through the dark. The same is true of “Pain,” where the conclusion of “I resist what I cannot change/ And I wanna find what can’t be found” produces another searing display of grating loneliness. These solos do not proclaim, “I am free.” No, the solos of Adam Granduciel say, “I want to be free,” and that’s something far more compelling.
Both claustrophobic and breathtakingly expansive, The War on Drugs’ latest effort is their best. There are, however, brief moments where the album’s seams show: the atmospheric “Clean Living” is a little too close for comfort in sound and feeling to “In Reverse,” while powerhouse jammer “Nothing To Find” takes its percussion and some of its guitar fills almost directly from “An Ocean in Between the Waves.” I also feel obliged, for better or worse, to point out its vintage Dylan-style musings like, “All my waiting was in vain/ I walked alone in pain/ Through the early morning rain.” But even with these minor concerns, A Deeper Understanding is easily one of the most satisfying guitar albums in recent memory, maintaining the feeling of being an original and important continuation of the American legacy of rock & roll. This isn’t only because the album’s music is great — it is — but, also, because it contains valuable, gripping moments of individuality and emotional honesty. It wants to teach us that the first step to freeing one’s self from pain is simply to acknowledge and listen to it. A Deeper Understanding supplements the question of whether we’re able to have meaningful relationships today with the questions of whether we should want to and whether we’re even committed enough to try. Understanding our desires and coming to recognize the things that prevent us from fulfilling them are the greatest tasks of being human, and Granduciel knows this. His is the music of someone who wants to be alive, and that’s something worth listening to.
Pitchfork 87
The obsessive studio work of Adam Granduciel creates a hermetic experience like no other. *A Deeper Understanding* is his most layered and meticulous album, a twlight world in which to lose yourself.
Fri Aug 25 05:00:00 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Atlantic)
The War on Drugs’ early albums felt like the result of a particularly daring, genre-smashing thought experiment: was it possible to blend big-sky Americana with the hypnotic thrum of motorik and psych rock? The answer, amazingly, was yes, but as their career progressed, the Philadelphia band’s sound began leaning towards the more rootsy side of the spectrum – 2014’s end-of-year-list-topping Lost in the Dream even managed to add a dash of Simple Minds-style 80s stadium rock for good measure. Now comes A Deeper Understanding, the War on Drugs’ most open celebration of their more earnest side, full of big-hearted songs of loss and loneliness. What keeps things from rolling into pastiche is the quality of Adam Granduciel’s songwriting; he’s capable both of pulling out a full-throated Springsteenian chorus on Holding On, and of achingly raw lyricism that seems ceaselessly in search of something more. “I resist what I cannot change / And I wanna find what can’t be found,” he sings on the album’s standout, the wonderfully melancholic Pain. The result is a record that banishes any listener cynicism on first contact; a wide-eyed look into the wild blue yonder.
Continue reading... Thu Aug 24 20:45:30 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Atlantic)
Adam Granduciel emerges from crippling introspection and perfectionism to serve up a set of ‘shimmering chrome dreams’ on his band’s fourth album
The cover of the fourth War on Drugs album is a red herring. Alone in a windowless room, songwriter Adam Granduciel looks up from his keyboard, apparently annoyed by an intruding photographer. The dank hermitage more accurately reflects the making of his 2014 breakthrough, Lost in the Dream, a drivetime reverie indebted to Springsteen, Dylan and Dire Straits that nearly drove him mad. Crushed by anxiety and the fallout from the break-up it documented, he rerecorded the whole album, at one point watching his speakers tremble to check whether the vibrations were up to scratch.
You could imagine it as the first dance at a wedding, rather than a soundtrack for ruing lost loves
Continue reading... Sun Aug 27 08:00:02 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 70
There will be those who disagree with me because they're stoned, and I say this as a long term fan of the band, but the songs on A Deeper Understanding, the new album from The War on Drugs, are pretty samey.
You can kind of guess the deal: long, reverby, minor key, melancholic, sounds absolutely phenomenal if you're mellowed off your goard... while a palpably different beast to its predecessors, with a fuller and denser 'band' sound, A Deeper Understanding is not a surprising record.
Or, er, is it?
There will be those who disagree with me because they’re only listening superficially and have fixed idea about what The War on Drugs are and represent, but get past A Deeper Understanding’s most obvious characteristics – Adam Granduciel's sublime, languorous Neil Young-meets-Robert Smith guitar tone and battered lungs – and there’s a strange and brave record lurking underneath.
Opener 'Up All Night' kicks off with an entirely startling sound: a wantonly tacky drum machine that fidgets away with a fascinating unexpectedness, almost deliberately puncturing the band's innate grandiosity; 'Pain' changes tack for underpinnings of sprightly piano and an absolutely almighty guitar solo that you could drown in; 'Hold On' ups the tempo a fraction and is probably the closest thing on A Deeper Understanding to the Dylan-gone-new wave textures of the band's early work. Later on, as we get further into the record, it’s amazing how bizarre it sounds if you really stop to think: ‘Thinking of a Place’ is 12 minutes long, the first six of them a cavernous wash of synth before a massive, strangely primitive Crazy Horse-style solo hacks into it around the six-minute mark then retreats, leaving the song to simply dissolving into a pool of harmonica and ethereal female vocals. Put the album on at any other given moment and you’re liable to find yourself confronted with as weird a guitar sound as you’ll find on a major label album in 2017.
But here’s the thing: I’m not sure how much you notice all that when confronted by the full songs, bound together by Granduciel’s grand, echoey production. In essence if you don’t examine the parts but focus on the whole tunes, you’re left with a bunch of richly melodic, richly melancholic guitar epics that sound strangely – if, it has to be said, beautifully – homogenous.
It's a funny album to judge: 20 or 30 years ago I suspect its unabashedly AOR production would probably have seen it unfairly panned; in 2017, coming off the back of the phenomenal Lost In the Dream, I suspect it might get a little overpraised. Personally I like it, even if the cumulative impact can be War of Drugs-ish that it verges on being a guilty pleasure. There is very, very little for you here if you don't dig lushly-produced guitar solos, although they're always interesting guitar solos – The War on Drugs are not a soft rock band.
A Deeper Understanding is a record that does and doesn’t put itself out there. If the music is technically probably rather more questing and brave, it never matches Lost in the Dream's highest highs: the music feels a bit too cluttered to quite have the same bleak emotional impact and gracious builds, and there's nothing with the burning pop song intensity of 'Red Eyes', or the sublime ascent of 'An Ocean Between the Waves'.
And yet it feels like an album of great integrity: even if his lyrics border on generic mumbling about feeling sad, Grandiciel's sincerity and sobriety never feel in doubt. He sounds like a lonely man who has taken genuine comfort in the astonishing sounds he can create, but has perhaps turned them into too much of a safety blanket via his own production. Maybe it feels like a safety blanket for me too – easier to get lost in than pay attention to. Produced differently, A Deeper Understanding could be really startling stuff; as it is, it feels like The War on Drugs have made an agreeable, fan-pleasing album to escape into and hide in, not to a record to take on the world – but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing in 2017.
Wed Aug 23 12:25:02 GMT 2017