War on Drugs

the last track sounds like it belongs in the closing scene of some cult film, to be enjoyed by Teens for years to come

i haven't really heard this record yet but for the last two the 80s influences were really specific to me--they were driving rockers with lots of processing, so songs like boys of summer and dancing in the dark.

you won't find those here

Yeah, "Boys of Summer" is the song that keeps coming to mind when I listen to this album.

Burning= dancing in the dark

ha, those are two songs that i was reminded of too but they're degraded copies rather than pristine replicas

who plays guitar on boys of summer?

Mike Campbell, sorely needed here.

i think the WoD songs are actually better than the originals

ok, Alfred, you don't like the record, we got it.

to recap:

alfred says he doesn't like this band and says he won't like this record
alfred decides to listen to the record
alfred doesn't like record therefore anyone who compares it to anything he likes is wrong

Succinct. Your grade: A-

can we go to recess now?

Apples first.

maaaan this sucks *kicks can*

http://www.principalspage.com/theblog/wp-content/uploads//2011/05/Teacher_gift_apple_thumb.jpg

dude nails the yelps of "barbarism begins at home," a favorite 80s jam. people hearing j-marr and v-reilly in these licks are right on

just looking at this thread now and i feel like pretty much every reference point suggested herein is accurate somewhere on the album, so well done team. i think it is really very good overall. i won't say some tracks couldn't lose a minute or so, but generally so much to enjoy.

I think part of the charm of this is that the dude is nowhere near the level of Campbell/Marr/Knopfler. It's like a Xerox of a Xerox.

i think the charm is that it evokes the 80 MOR but just a weird blurry stoned memory of it

Last post completely OTM.

aor on drugs

^^ redundant, no?

"Burning" is my favorite, and the only one on which I heard the "eighties" influence, here in the form of the synth from Belinda Carlisle's "Mad About You."

i don't understand what's supposed to be wrong with the drums

another 80s influence: dude sounds just like Paul Simon on Graceland, something that's been at the back of my mind until I just grasped it a second ago

Funny you should bring that up. As the story goes, a lot of "Boys of Summer" but specifically the drums came straight from the Campbell demo, because Henley was not happy with the way real drums sounded. I guess this guy pulled the same thing on a few tracks, sticking with the demo stuff rather than trying to recapture the vibe in the studio.

xpost

well, generally, comparisons to Petty and Springsteen need to mention that Max Weinberg and Stan Lynch drummed for them and not a metronome.

Boss demo! WoD template!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgKi2bPatmU

Fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgKi2bPatmU

Argh can everyone stfu about the fucking drums?

seriously i just don't even understand what the complaint was, i listened, they're drums

all i know is 'SOME PEOPLE don't like the drums'

i think the charm is that it evokes the 80 MOR but just a weird blurry stoned memory of it

haven't heard this record, and the above may well be otm, but it makes me want to kill

I think alex in mainhattan said "Computer drums suck" or whatever. I feel like the metronomic motorik quality is a lot of what I like about this, though.

oh well that's just bonkers, don't mind me (or alex in mainhattan)

dominique don't kill me pls

If I hadn't heard the record, from that description I'd be expecting weedy chillwave shit, but it does make sense.

xpost

haha don't worry! Just sick of the "weird blurry stoned" thing -- seems like an overused Instagram filter for indie music

xp yeah that sounds like every other Ariel Pink description

Someone's already mentioned this above, but the similarity between "Burning" and Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" is about as strong as you can get without being a sample. I played it for a friend and they had a very negative reaction—immediately mentioned Young Turks. I still love the song though.

Damn. I read that note in a review too and still don't hear it; closer to Belinda to my ears.

it's very clear imo i joked about it on another thread last week

those damn drums. listening to them is like being hit by someone with a hammer on your head. i don't think they have a metronomic quality. that would be jaki liebezeit or even more so klaus dinger. drums played by a human will always have small rhythmic shifts, little imprecisions, which you don't even hear consciously but which make all the difference between dead computer beats and living, breathing human drumming. the same goes fo metronoms i think. they are not 100% regular. they seem to be but the pendulum is hitting the air, it interacts with its environment which computers don't. and the metronome will get slower and slower the closer it comes to being "emptied".

love the drum machine

xpost to Josh in Chicago

A bit about how he made the tracks from an interview I did with him a few weeks ago (from transcript, hence typos)

"A lot is to do with how I start the song. I start them at home; I don’t have an idea and go into the studio with the band, and it doesn’t become democratic. Even though we became a band with Slave Ambient, I didn’t ewant to to go into the studio and say “OK guys, here are some song ideas. Let’s record them live!” I love playing keyboards and doing drum machines and I love building up and idea. I wanted to create the illusion of a great dynamic rock band without having to go down that road, and keep sonic control. So starting everything in my home studio in the same way: write the general gist of the song on piano or guitar, kind of layer it. Start with some rhythmic ideas and build it up" …

Hard to know a song’s finished?
"Totally. Also it’s the thing I love. It’s really fun – you get this window of time when you get to do what you love to do, and then you gotta go promote it. I love playing, too, but watching the song go on a journey is awesome. I was listening to demos on the airplane of where some of the songs started and where they ended up was amazing. I tried painting for a long time. I wasn’t very good, but what I liked was the act of painting – pitting a lot of colours on, scraping with a knife, filling in the white spaces with brighter colours. I feel that’s what we do with the music – keep building it up until it feels like a landscape."

Force yourself to stop?
"Sometimes. We do so much in mixing, that what I have to force myself t o do is create a mixing date. This time I’d booked two weeks in Brooklyn – and that’s where you make those decisions: let strip it down. I’m usually pretty good by that point at letting it go. There were still a couple of things I wanted to change, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to bring it back up and risk losing the magic. So you don’t have to pull it out of my hands, but getting it to the mixing stage is hard, because I love adding. I love recording. I like exhaiusting every idea I have. You can di that with nusic – you can go down a bad road and come back."

I went into seclusion with this record. My diet was sparse but nourishing. At first they said I was crazy. "Dell, you really can't live on Rice Crispies and cashew nuts alone". I smirked with the all of the chutzpah of 41 years of quarter-muffled dreams and a thesaurus whose glue had been long since been transformed into the children of bookbugs.

Granduciel's warm tones spoke of many things to me. Deferred responsibility from shopworn, overfolded received wisdom, a furlough from powder drugs, a taking of refuge in the soul alone, pure abandonment to the inexorable momentum of individuation, a deliberate commitment to resisting the easy arc of lovelessness in all of its contemporary forms.

When I at last woke up my eyes were crusted over with what I can only embarrassingly label as unalloyed wisdom. Embarrassing not in its content, but in the reflection of sheer ignorance on my part that such an eventual revelation implied. Like sliding on the headlamps within a showroom-fresh car for the first time, my entire world, i.e., my raw sense of experience, was soon, almost startlingly so, bathed in soft amber, and shampooed with the essence of new car smell promising me that in fact there is no other way but forward, not following, but actually being the beatific flow of awareness, manifesting as the alleged objects and personalities contained therein. Once the lush upholstery had received its initial crush from my peripatetic frame, I found that then even birdsong exists seemingly mostly to herald inner growth. Buds and shoots.

Granduciel has taken the grim vulgarity of the eighties aesthetic and all that such implies in its Nagelian horror, and infused Philip Michael Thomas' pastel slacks with actual shakti... a cabana surrounded with living waters. As ever-deepening easter egg colors transformed the linen fabrics into a landscape of saturated indigo and crushed violet, Granduciel has invited any comers to partake of his smorgasbord of simultaneous gratitude and homily of there never being such a thing as too much sugar, just as the energetics of moonbeams transform all grain into the butterflies and rapid heartbeats before running out the door as sun sips just over the horizon. From Rice Crispies and cashews to spontaneous grandeur and ghee, life prescriptions such as "Red Eyes" masquerade as humble songs while fixing themselves onto the node of our Being which in very fact places ourselves at a very precise point in the actual cosmos, the ACTUAL world ecology; like a pushpin stuck onto a world map with representations of nadis replacing the equatorial fundaments.

"Was there a substitute for the soul?" Granduciel ponders and earnestly asks, stretching out the question teasingly like confectionary at a taffy pull in late August... There is only one way to find out.

I like the fighting abt whether or not some song off this sounds like some stupid song I don't want to hear again anyway

Albertine, I would like to agree to agree with you that he was pushing it a little with the Young Turks "tribute". But my problem involves that I like the original so much.

man the guitar tone on the solo in 'suffering' is all-consuming