Another recruit here! Where do I enlist?
Artiste: The War on Drugs
Nationality: American (Pennsylvania)
Album: Lost in the dream
Year: 2014
Label: Secretly Canadian
Genre: Indie Rock
Tracks:
Under the pressure
Red eyes
Suffering
An ocean in between the waves
Disappearing
Eyes to the wind
The haunting idle
Burning
Lost in the dream
In reverse
Chronological position: Third album
Familiarity: Zero
Interesting factoid: Three of the ten tracks here are single words which end in the suffix -ing (
Burning, Suffering and
Disappearing.) Add in
The haunting idle and you have four. Hey, it's the most interesting snippet I could come up with for a band about whom I know nothing and have heard nothing!
Initial impression: Uptempo and poppy but with a strong edge and I really like the piano.
Best track(s): Pretty much everything
Worst track(s): Pretty much nothing
Comments: About time I got back to these mini-reviews. Cue this one and then nothing for months!
Well I'll do the best I can. I've been hearing a lot about this album so thought I'd give it a shot. Nice boppy start, cool piano work and the vocalist puts me in mind of a cross between Roger Waters and Dylan. Yeah, whatever. Sue me. The average settlement is ten thousand dollars. Really like the extended instrumental bit in the middle of the first track, also the long ambient ending. Oh yeah, further impressions bring to mind The Waterboys. Hey, I'm weird, y'know? Good start, certainly. And it just gets better with the first single
Red eyes, kicks up nicely in the middle with a lot of energy.
Some of this really reminds me of the early work of Springsteen and perhaps to a lesser degree the more recent Gaslight Anthem material; it's very American, very workingman's music, and in track three we get the first ballad in
Suffering, which features some very introspective guitar work that recalls Prefab Sprout around the “Jordan” era. Some superb organ here also, and then you really hear the influence of Dylan on vocalist Adam Granduciel in
An ocean in between the waves, which is a mid-paced rocker with a great beat.
Disappearing has an almost chart/soul/pop feel about it, and is another slower song, though not what I'd call a ballad. Sweet slide guitar. Reminds me in places of seventies or eighties Chris Rea.
I like everything I hear so far. The thing I'm finding as I go through the album is that though there are long songs (the opener falls just shy of nine minutes, ambitious or what?) they don't seem long. Nothing tends to drag and even when there's an extended instrumental, be it an intro, outro or middle section, it fits in really well with the rest of the song and just makes you enjoy it more. There's nothing here (so far) that I've thought was too long, overstretched or unnecessarily extended. Some really laidback piano and guitar work and we're into
Eyes to the wind, but to be honest at this point I don't think it matters as every single track so far has been superb and I don't really see that changing.
I spoke in the Prog Rock Album Club about a phenomenon I like to call the Hum Factor, which is just what it sounds like: the temptation or desire to hum one or more tracks you like off an album. In my opinion, if you don't have a reasonable Hum Factor for an album it's probably not going to be something you enjoyed. This happened with the Ozric Tentacles album we were reviewing, and even though it's instrumental I don't give it a pass as you can hum tunes as easily as songs. What has that got to do with this album? Well I think I'll be humming --- or at least remembering --- most if not all of the songs here. The Hum Factor is so important to me that I'm adding it in as a new category in this mini-reviews.
By the way, there was a great sax outro on that last song, and the next one up is pure ambient abstract goodness; nice to see the guys mix it up a little.
Burning kinds of fade-echoes in from that, sort of continuing the basic theme almost as if
The haunting idle was an intro to it, then kicks up into a really nice commercially appealing rocker, uptempo and really emotional, with a touch of Rod Stewart's
Young Turks in the rhythm, particularly the percussion. The title then is a somewhat more laidback song with elements of country and folk in it, nice chingling guitars and a great rhythm, then we end as we began, on a long track as
In reverse showcases some of the best elements of The War on Drugs's guitar skills with some very ambient keyboard too and some nice soundscapes. Thought it would be a downbeat ending but no, it picked up halfway and it really ends the album well.
Overall impression: Seriously impressed and I can see why this album is so highly regarded.
Hum Factor (Out of 10): 8
Intention: Definitely going to have to listen to more of this band's work.