The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

I'd fav that tweet if I could find it

says a guy who bought the DB reissue

Just listened to most of Division Bell cuz of this thread and JEEZUS is that shit terrible

all i can think of with this album title is that stupid kate bush song

new song is awesome this is going to be a great album

kinda bummed they're mostly playing arenas at this point, but then again last time I saw them they definitely channeled some Bruce

I kinda like Division Bell and Endless River

I thought the new song was good that Kate Bush song is great btw

that sweet spot being 1984, with him gazing into the peeling ceiling paint of a haunted school hall.

I wonder how many times he's listened to "I'm on Fire"...

I like the new songs but the overall hype is exaggerated. They are recycling ideas and it's becoming hard to distinguish between the songs themselves.

https://youtu.be/z_qaKlf2TzU

I love all of the releases from this album. I can see what some people are saying in that it all has a similar thing to it but I think that's precisely what the group should be delivering at this stage in their output. It's the perfect realization of their sound at this moment in time.

sounds like john mcentire produced this and recruited eric claridge to play bowie. awesome in other words

he sounds like John Mayer.

really looking forward to this, all the new songs growing on me with every listen

http://www.thewarondrugs.net/firstlisten/

If there has to be a comparison he sounds more like Bryan Adams

i hear alasdair maclean with a dylan twang

More of the same ... and that's OK.

well

i love "strangest thing"

that's good. So is the first track.

The first song is glorious

I do like this, but don't quite understand the guy getting defined as some sort of perfectionist, a trait I keep seeing popping up in profiles. Really? Anxiety about releasing something, or saying it is done, does not make you a perfectionist.

he objectively does not sound like John Mayer

what about subjectively

He at best hypothetically sounds like John Mayer.

I stand by my Dylan joins 90s Pink Floyd

90s floyd didn't groove like this unfortunately

The band chose an apt name: like most drugs, they're fine in moderation.

That's what Dylan brought to Pink Floyd.

In seriousness, the Pitchfork article on their roots in heartland synth is pretty otm.

Reminds me of Street Fighting Years by Simple Minds.

vocally, granduciel has always reminded me of Petty's vocal on The Waiting if he sang exactly like that on every song

I was impressed by the NPR interview this morning, not the gist of it, per se, but WoD guy himself. I was expecting some mumbly indie dude but he seemed really upbeat and relaxed and happy to be there. Good for him, I say.

don't quite understand the guy getting defined as some sort of perfectionist

fwiw, acquaintance of mine who played on this album says Adam "slaved & bled over this album"

i mean that's the sort of thing you might hear about any album, but i believe him

around the time they released 'lost in the dream', granduciel said he wasn't even sure he had another album in him. so for an album that may not have even happened, this is really something else. the album is balanced much better LITD, whose back half i always found boring, despite liking all of the songs. i don't think it has a song as good as 'red eyes' but there are for sure a number of POX GOAT jams on it. 'nothing to find' might be the most war on drugs song ever, they even quote a guitar riff from the last album on it.

LITD took a few years to sink in for me but this one has me right out of the gate

also refreshing to have a critically acclaimed rock band in 2017 who appreciates the emotional power of a guitar solo

It's all very Musician-magazine-tries-to-grapple-with-the-end-of-the-eighties-core. And some may like that.

It took an Argentine restaurant for me to accept Lost in a Dream.

i'm just glad someone who's meandered all the way into the androgyne world of indie has come out the other side with an (i think) more examined reflection on masculinity in 2017

i don't know if/don't think that adam granduciel is queer, but at the risk of overlaying identity signification this feels just queered enough to poke at what masculinity means without being overtly femme, which i kind of really appreciate

this album is so lush, I think it could probably make trees grow faster and flowers bloom.

Dire straits was one of the biggest acts on Earth in 1985-1986, maybe the biggest —like huge in continental and Eastern Europe. Yet I do not know of one single noteworthy act that wanted to sound anything like 'em in three decades…until the WoD . It's like no one, not even any alt-country acts, wanted to sound like DS for so long that the one that finally did then became big. I know a lotta old guys (the Musician mag cohort indeed) and guys around my age who like respectable 80s AOR who do backflips for this band.

otm

In Chains is so great!

Isn't the most obvious reference Springsteen? Everytime I hear one of his songs I start thinking I'd rather listen to Springsteen instead.

the album is great but he could edit half of the songs, most of the time they just go by without groove or doing anything interesting.

saw them live where they channelled Bruce much more than on record

the album is great but he could edit half of the songs, most of the time they just go by without groove or doing anything interesting.

So how can it be great?

Ok maybe great is too strong a word heh... I mean it's produced in a way that everything sounds "lush" and wjen the songd finally settle they are good but then they start meandering... I don't think he does anything special with his arrangements in the non-vocals bits and he doesn't seem how to end a song, he just starts piling up sounds until the song exhausts itself. The shortest song in here is 4mins long but most of them are well over the 6min mark and it becomes a bit of a chore. Take Dan Bejar/Destroyer as a counter-argument on how to do 6min+ songs right.

When it's good it's good and when it's bad it isn't offensively bad it's just a bit boring but it's produced in a way that's easy to leave in the background without being annoying.

the album is great but he could edit half of the songs, most of the time they just go by without groove or doing anything interesting.

this is how i felt about the back half of LITD and i think this impulse is reigned in and streamlined on the new one

So how can it be great?

because they're a jammy rock band where being concise is beside the point?

they only know one song and i love that song. but i do not like to listen to it ten times in a row in one evening. in other words live they suck.

You mean that song that starts on the IV/ and then it goes to the I
That sounded pretty good man/let's do another one
But I bet you never expected the song to go.../to the V

Saw them last night at The Fox in Oakland. I'm a big fan, but the show was still pretty much a snoozer. They literally brought their entire studio with them. Adam Granduciel had like 50-ish guitar pedals, and there were three different keyboard areas! It all added up to a giant wall of beautiful sound, but there was zero excitement. They also had a beautiful light show, which made up for some of the overly-mellow vibe, but I was waiting all night for some powerful moment that never came.

sounds pretty much like what I imagined

This album is the opposite of a grower. I seem to like it less and less each time I put it on. Even the songs I initially thought were great are becoming merely good.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Friday, September 22, 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Apparently this album is the epitome of “opposite of a grower” because I was listening to Lost in the Dream earlier today and couldn’t believe WoD hadn’t released an album since 2014... only to find that they released this album in 2017. I have no memory of it - but according to this threat I listened to it, liked it at first and then grew to dislike it. And now I’ve successfully erased it from my mind.

the art of pretend forgetfulness 2007, since i can't find the other thread

according to this threat

good typo, ILX spirit.

Thanks to this thread I do recall now that they released an 11-minute songs as their lead single. But I still don’t remember how it goes.

no one does

Maybe it's still going.

Thinking of a Place remains, to me, an awesome song.

the new live album is really great

yup. had me at the track listing, for obvious reasons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Lf31f7gRw

the best filmed version of An Ocean In Between The Waves is from Pukkelpop '18, some guy says in the comments here (I haven't seen all of them but I agree that this is possibly even better than on the live album) & starts at 8:25 here (first two songs are Nothing To Find (intro missing) and Pain)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjY0-7ptghk

Having acoustic guitar on the rocking/upbeat numbers live as above is really smart, adding that strumming texture to it as you would on record

I was fully prepared to sneer at this because of some misplaced idea that it'd be overdubbed and polished so much as to basically be a studio album. Well, another bullshit opinion destroyed: Eyes to the Wind just completely took me out at the knees.

Even though it's mighty fine and impressive I still miss so many songs they could have selected for the live album. (Holding On, Nothing To Find, In Chains, Burning, etc etc) There's a couple of great sounding full shows out there that do contain them (Northside and Sziget for instance), I wonder if keeping this limited to 1 CD and his referring to Bruce's 1975-1985 is a subtle hint to bootleggers, to please release an alternate version?

Pppp

?

album is incredible

also a deeper understanding is my fav of their albums, this thread is insane

I think I butt dialed that last post from Zing, sorry.

that's exactly the post a butt would dial too

Butt dialling, pianississimo.

J0rdan S otm

thinking of a place is still the best song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qKCDJAFkWo

they might be a band which, jeez you'd maybe have to go back to the 70s? whose best album is a live album

a little premature to say that obv but I really really like the live album so far

Oh I guess Phish maybe? you'd have to ask a fan, I don't know that much about them

the 4 part podcast about 2020 + the live album (4 x 25 minutes, approx) is pretty interesting & enjoyable: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-super-high-quality-podcast/id1538505374

a longer podcast episode on the making of Lost In The Dream https://www.buzzsprout.com/1346161/14687088-lost-in-the-dream-10th-anniversary