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Wagonwheel Blues
Rating: 6.9 | 1 User Review | Send to Friend
By Scott Hesel
On the War on Drugs debut album Wagonwheel Blues, frontman Adam Granduciel is obsessed with the coast. It’s evident in the song titles (the two-part “Show me the Coast” and “Coast Reprise”) and the travel-narrative lyrics that dot the album. The coast is the perfect metaphor for the War on Drugs’ sound, as they are the musical equivalent of land meeting water: the bedrock American songwriting of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen clashing with the guitar swirl and delay atmospherics once practiced by bands like the Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. Much of the press to date surrounding the War on Drugs has hammered these reference points into oblivion, but it’s important to note just why this combination of disparate sounds works. Unlike their trad-rock peers of past and present, the War on Drugs don’t worship formalist song structures or romanticize analog production. And unlike the shoegaze bands of yesteryear, the effects pedals complement both the rhythm section and Granduciel’s vocals rather than overwhelm them. This balance is on display on Wagonwheel Blues’ standout tracks: “Taking the Farm” is all manic energy via slide guitar and synthesizer, while “Needle in Your Eye #16” combines a grimy keyboard vamp over a sampled loop, with Granduciel singing like a man possessed trying to push his vocal over top of the noise. Most impressive, however, is the near six-minute “There is no Urgency”, a song whose foundation is nothing more than a two chord drone of heavily processed guitar and keyboards with a tacked-on drumbeat. Granduciel’s ad-libbed vocal, though, manages to inject tension with a lyric about a life unraveling, and appropriately enough, anxiety over friends who “will not follow you to the coast”. Indeed, the War on Drugs don’t have any followers to the coast: For the moment, that world is their's alone. (Secretly Canadian)
1 User Review
Rating: 8.8
By: Ryan McNally
6.9? Seriously? This is the best album to come out of Philly since Private Eyes.
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