The War on Drugs Liverpool show at the Kazimier
plus special guest support TBA
7.30pm, 23 February @ The Kazimier
Tickets £9adv available from Ticketline, Seeticekts, Ticketweb, Probe Records & Hairy Records (The Music Consortium
The band is steeped in music of the past, mining the territory between Americana and the esoteric UK. rock of the 80s. With songs that coax comparisons to Tom Petty and The Smiths, Bob Dylan and Brian Eno, the band's debut Wagonwheel Blues wears its many influences proudly and prominently.
It all began back in 2005, when Adam Granduciel met Kurt Vile and began playing music. Several lineup changes later, Adam Granduciel and bass player Dave Hartley remain the group’s only original members.
The vehicle of Adam Granduciel — frontman, rambler, shaman, pied piper guitarist and apparent arranger-extraordinaire — The War on Drugs seemed similarly obsessed with disparate ideas, with building uncompromised rock monuments from pieces that might have seemed odd pairs. On their debut, the life-affirming Wagonwheel Blues, folk-rock marathons come damaged by drum machines.
Electronic and instrumental reprises precede songs they’ve yet to play, and Dr. Seuss becomes lyrical motivation for bold futuristic visions.
Now, Granduciel has done it again, better than before: Slave Ambient, their proper second album, is a brilliant 47-minute sprawl of rock ’n’ roll, conceptualized with a sense of adventure and captured with seasons of bravado. Slave Ambient features a team of Philadelphia’s finest musicians, including multi-instrumentalists Dave Hartley and Robbie Bennett, and drummer Mike Zanghi. Recorded throughout the last four years at Granduciel’s home studio in Philly, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album puts the weirdest influences in just the right places. Synthesizers fall where you might expect more electric guitars (and vice versa); country-rock sidles up to the warped extravagance of ’80s pop. Instant classic “Baby Missiles” is part Springsteen fever dream, part motorik anthem.
The War on Drugs are one of the most exciting young rock ‘n’ roll bands in the world. People question that conviction, unconvinced that an act so new or with such clear historical forebears could absolutely be called a favorite. Sure, TheWar on Drugs’music overflows with echoes and strains of the songs and sounds we’ve all loved, yet it always feels singular and seamless, a perfect and pure distillation of influences into something that sounds like nothing else. Every song on Slave Ambient is instantly identifiable and infinitely intricate, a latticework of ideas and energies building into mile-high rock anthems.
They are songs for future converts, welcome signs for folks who should, soon enough, also call The War on Drugs their favorite young rock ’n’ roll band on the planet.
