The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

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?

strawberry or guava?

I was talking to Moka, by the way, who listed several flaws that would detract from an album's greatness. If he thinks it's merely "good," that's fine.

i know, i was giving a possible explanation on how it could still be considered great given his critiques

alfred there are lots of unhappy campers in the comment section below your review :(

Well, again, it's not a bad album by design, imho. The good outweighs the bad, and the bad is not terrible...also it doesn't feel like the songs are needlessly long because the artist is presenting them as self-important ambitious epics (eg: Oasis), I imagine it's more like he just doesn't know when to stop... maybe a byproduct of his live performances?

The potential is there though, if he ever learns to trim down the fat or do something more iwith those instrumental passages.

I cant tell by your review if you hated the album or not Alfred haha... it seems like we're on the same page.

Three super solid and super hooky tracks (2-4) and the rest is pretty good if not a bit samey (as people have mentioned). It reminds a bit of 'Bloom' by Beach House where the group's current sound has been realized to its maximum potential but another one like it would start to wear on me.

I don't mind the long bits as it's usually hauling off on a section I really enjoy.

i like it so far

the guitar tone at the end of "Pain", that's what i'm here for

i think i liked the idea of this band and some individual songs more than any particular album, but i'm pretty in love with this one

I love the backgroundness of this band in general, it's like ambient rock. And then the guitar solos pop up and pull you back in (sometimes).

this album is good to listen to whilst smoking w33d

The vocals are too loud for me to tune out while drinking, etc.

Like I wrote, this isn't terrible but the mythmaking already going on with this band/Granduciel is absurd and incommensurate with the modest achievements of this album and the last. I know rock is in dire shape on the charts, but The War on Drugs isn't the well in the desert.

I love the backgroundness of this band in general, it's like ambient rock. And then the guitar solos pop up and pull you back in (sometimes).

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, August 27, 2017 7:24 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

feel like this one is just more... misty and enveloping than the last one. i didn't really pay "thinking of a place" much mind as a single but the way the little like sighing harmonica bits are as magnetic as any of the guitar solos is one of my fav things about the record. "nothing to find" is my shit right now, it's funny that he plays a lick from "ocean in between the waves"

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.

this is very interesting and i've been thinking about it for a bit. this might be the reason that we can't stop talking about who they sound like: because it's a "sound" from the 80s that hasn't been recycled a million times already. the closest similarity i can think of is destroyer's kaputt (and it's probably no coincidence that WoD were the opening act on that tour)

"in chains" is an amazing dylan-bruce hybrid

Dire Straits, and especially Mark Knopfler's guitar playing, might not have influenced much American or European music, but it was strangely influential to the music of West Africa, especially the Tuareg culture that birthed Tinariwen and Bombino

(this prob belongs in another thread, but too interesting not to share: http://africasacountry.com/2015/03/the-unexpected-popularity-of-dire-straits-in-north-african-tuareg-communities/ )

that's fascinating!

yeah, v interesting read!

I always got more Don Henley or Steve Winwood in the 80s from War on Drugs than Dire Straits. Musically, not vocally. Also Dire Straits lyrics are way more narrative than WoD.

Don Henley's late '80s material was often of punishing length too.

You're looking at it all wrong: maybe War on Drugs has been mostly influenced by North African nomadic Tuareg rock all along!

his buddy kurt vile (former drug on warrior) for sure was

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_oUt5Pi9jo

(^ that show slayed)

good grief…this song "disappearing" is way way way WAY all up in Knopfler's steez…

Had this on repeat the last few days while decorating; I still much prefer Lost In The Dream, but it's slowly growing on me.

Does somewhat feel like if the vocal tracks of several of these songs were swapped over, I would struggle to notice the difference ...

the music this draws from hits me in a deeply nostalgic place, really the sounds themselves and i enjoy this band as a child in many ways and therefore understand their ultimate dullness but like them in a way that i'm not inclined to interrogate.

^^this, basically.

I've listened to it three times and I can't remember a single song. It doesn't sound bad tho... I guess it qualifies as ambient rock?

^^ perfectly put (xxpost)

xpost Moka I'd actually been thinking of posting something about them as the classic rock version of trance or ambient stuff

Most of the reviews on rateyourmusic are saying that it's nice music to leave in the background. I found this one funny:

Best New Hold Music
i can't believe the 11 minute song, thinking of a place, was by a decent margin my favorite song on here. i guess poorly written 6 minute songs can feel longer than an 11 minute song.

i liked strangest thing too but, point aside - let's square up about something here. there is no fucking way that any more than 1/4 of the people who attend their concerts know what song they're playing at any given moment if it's not Red Eyes. how the hell would they know? they're trying to force as many songs into the same narrow aesthetics as possible and succeeding quite well at it. i even liked their previous album a bit, but they're clearly not really trying here.

I suppose opinions will vary depending on what you want and classify as good music. There's people who think being bland or unmemorable is more offensive than well, being willfuly tasteless.

i quite liked the album before but this one is totally forgettable, just passing me by without any hooks.

This album is decent, but I feel like they could've gone in a direction a little bit more interesting than ambient rock. Hate to pull the "first album is the BEST" card, but I feel like Wagonwheel Blues (and parts of Slave Ambient) went places they never really came back to. Like, the two sprawling songs on Wagonwheel Blues (There is No Urgency, Show me the Coast), had a little bit more edge and aggressiveness. Both instrumentals on that album were pretty solid as well (by contrast, every instrumental since has been pretty dull, so it's probably for the best he ditched them on this one).

He owes Petty a royalty for Up All Night imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BJXwNeKsQ

i really, really enjoyed this album. i do sort of agree that it's background music and not really memorable but that's OK.

I was pretty wary of this at first; as the tracks came out I thought he was slipping into parody (if, indeed, he hadn't already). But I've listened a few more time and it's really growing on me. Or maybe it's more accurate to say I'm growing into it. With LITD, it was 'Burning' and 'Eyes to the Wind' that initially affected me, but the (breathing) space of those more ambient later tracks are equally full of steady magic. It's proving the same with the new one: I find myself almost craving the defeat of 'You Don't Have To Go'.

Less poncey version: it's alright this, innit.

I truly love his sound but what a lot of you are saying about this album is how I felt about the previous one (which seemed like a redundant iteration of the classic Slave Ambient). So Im not in a hurry to check this one out.

slave ambient is great, a nice reiteration of the classic wagonwheel blues. he's like the feelies and real estate to me at this point where i want rehashings of that perfect jersey/philly sound forever

You are right, reggie "Slave Ambient" is very good, I just listened to it for the first town. That full 80s sound is there already though I think it is even richer on "Lost in the Dream" which I still prefer. That album reminds me more of shoe-gazing. Live they were quite average on the "Dream" tour I thought. I think in the end I prefer the Kurt Vile guitar sound to their keyboard heavy textures.

Town=time

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.

i listened through and don't remember a single thing about it