War 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

yeh it sounds like a copy of talk talk spirit of eden melting under the sun

Young Turks is so great, b/c if you hear it casually while rassling heads of iceberg lettuce am Supermarkt you think that it's like all about Patty Plymouth and Billy Crescendo pretending to live out a Bruce Springsteen tribute band song. but it's actually a song about the soul giving birth to new expressions. It's about how time is the boon ally of freedom and not an oppressor. the space where the psyche unfolds. songlyrics.com/dell

I think maybe I understand Alfred'z reservation about the lyrics. But maybe he is doing too claustrophobic a read of them? And ignoring the other signifiers present in the overall music that is being given to us.

When I listen to this record, I hear someone who is operating from such a great space that he feels eminently comfortable with exploiting ridic tropes, and wielding them in a redemptive fashion. "Surrounded by the night". Yah, silly perhaps on first reading, but I think it's an expression of working one's way through the murky unconscious? I do. And if you use the word "soul" in yr lyrics, then obv you are putting yrself ut there for riducule, but... "to beat it down/to get to my soul/against my will" to me bespeaks a thirtysomething's grappling with the project of individuation.

All utterances are obv. projections of the soul, and naturally it's easy to dismiss things when ppl are working in overused idioms -- a lot of ppl in this thread brought up that destroyer record as a ref point. But, there's a thing where someone can play a certain chord or say certain words, and just by virtue of the energy that they imbue it with, it communicates something that hasn't been done previously. so like, Joe Shmoe (sp?) singing a line can be radically, worlds away from say, Elvis singing it... I hear this record, (LiaD) similarly, as being a redemption of cliches that most ppl don't wanna deal with let alone revamp, much as our psyches overflow with refuse that none of us want to deal with in the immediate sense. But everything discarded becomes absolute gold in the crucible of the psyche, as Karl and Jesus attested to. And maybe it is somewhat a Philly thing. If you have lived in a place that is so inimical to the development of everything that equals you then you are forced back onto yourself and the actuality that constitutes the ground of your being.

"Carl", ooooops

Hmm yeah, I can see that. Btw I'm not dismissing this rec at all and wld like to hear it, just finding a lot of the thread v funny

There are so many songs I hated in the late eighties that I have come to love at this point, so...

I take back what I said about everything sounding like "Baby Missiles" now that I've gotten to know the record better. That said, I still don't think there is as much variety here as on Slave Ambient. This is really dragging for me by the final third. I like all the extended instrumental bits on these songs but I wish they'd flow into each other a little more--to make a greater whole. Instead each track sort of goes on for a while and then peters out, and then Granduciel starts all over again with the next track. It gets a little tedious. Again going back to Slave Ambient, there is such a great run from "Your Love Is Calling My Name" to "The Animator" to "Come to the City" to "Come for It." This album sort of reaches toward that level of flow but doesn't actually attain it.

wait a second -- is the drummer for war on drugs the same guy who has been playing with chris forsyth and the solar motel band? because that guy is awesome.

war on drugs has a new drummer now

oh. i've only heard one song by the war on drugs (from this new album) and it sounded alright, but i was thinking that if the drummer was the same guy i saw, he was not playing to the fullest of his ability on that song, for whatever reason.

rock is a mature art form at this time, you have to approach it like how ppl approach jazz - certain artists structure their music or have certain sonic qualities or ways of playing that you find appealing, nothing "big" is ever coming, and i don't care if it does. i think there will always be bands that understand how to be a band together, to play and write in ways that appeal to me, to find a sound or qualities that are worthwhile

i think war on drugs does this

but yeah like if you're looking for some revelation or w/e it's not it

rock is in the details

― Little Nicky Pizza loved that rascal Rust (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 19, 2014

yup, see, e.g., ↓

Zoo Music ‏@zoomusic666 -- If you believe ppl shouldn't "reinvent the wheel" stay out of the music business.

those seem to opposite sentiments to me?

omg . . . you are right. and i haven't even been drinking.

wait, have i? no.

just spun this for the first time while working yesterday, and for some reason, i'm getting heavy "walkin' in memphis" vibes from the opening track. ...am i that far off?

i do like how this album makes me remember the 80s that don't seem to get remembered as much, not new order's 80s or the cure's 80s or afrika bambaataa's 80s or duran duran's 80s, but the 80s of terrible jeans and weird sweaters and bruce hornsby and late period steve winwood albums and pink floyd bedroom posters and eddie and the cruisers and those fake bands that played at party scenes in r-rated cable comedies etc

all that stuff, at least for me growing up near a farm town, was really the 80s as i experienced it..the other stuff seemed like little exotic things that you could maybe see a passing reference to in a hip gas-station purchased rolling stone in the front of the book

― Little Nicky Pizza loved that rascal Rust (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:48 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

white dudes with moustaches in fedoras playing saxophone

i saw some weird old tribute to soul thing on PBS the other night, billy preston was the bandleader, must've been 87 or 88, the whole band besides billy was these jobber white dudes with moustaches and fedoras and the bassist was some dude dressed up like a "punk rocker" from a police academy movie or someone who escaped from sigue sigue sputnik, they would have a bunch of classic soul dudes come out and do their one big song for a bunch of white ppl dressed for a fancy ball....percy sledge came out and killed it on "when a man loves a woman" and had on a tuxedo and a perfect Soul Glo afro that really shined in the lights, then sam (I think it was sam maybe it was dave) came out and did a song and pulled up some woman in a really terrible dress and they sexy danced really awkardly, it's like now THAT's the 80s i remember sorry interpol

― Little Nicky Pizza loved that rascal Rust (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:56 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love these posts btw

the bassist was some dude dressed up like a "punk rocker" from a police academy movie or someone who escaped from sigue sigue sputni

pictures, some dude, or didn't happen

I take back what I said about everything sounding like "Baby Missiles" now that I've gotten to know the record better. That said, I still don't think there is as much variety here as on Slave Ambient. This is really dragging for me by the final third. I like all the extended instrumental bits on these songs but I wish they'd flow into each other a little more--to make a greater whole. Instead each track sort of goes on for a while and then peters out, and then Granduciel starts all over again with the next track. It gets a little tedious. Again going back to Slave Ambient, there is such a great run from "Your Love Is Calling My Name" to "The Animator" to "Come to the City" to "Come for It." This album sort of reaches toward that level of flow but doesn't actually attain it.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Sunday, March 23, 2014 11:27 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See, for me, War On Drugs is this album preceded by Future Weather, which I thought was far superior to Slave Ambient (I realize I'm in the minority here; no one ever seems to talk about that EP). I think I agree with a lotta folks here that LITD is a sort of culmination of the band's myriad strengths (so far), but then, I also like their slow-burning ones as much as the "Baby Missles"-y ones ("Suffering" is a favorite on the new one). If anything, I think there is more variety on this one than the last. Not necessarily in the arrangements, but in the songs, absolutely.

Otm on Future Weather > Slave Ambient

hahahaha of course! lee atwater!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (February 17, 2014) – This March, PBS viewers will be treated to the world television premiere of a never-before-seen historic concert featuring Sam Moore and some of the biggest names in blues, soul and rock history performing their greatest hits. Recorded during a live Presidential Inaugural Concert Event in 1989 for President George H.W. Bush, the video and audiotapes of this concert were presumed lost for nearly 20 years after the untimely death of Lee Atwater, the concert organizer and host.

I like the Bryan Adams vibe :(

I hear more of that than of The Boss, but that's probably because I grew up listening to the former and not the latter.

Um...recs?

I'm hearing a lot of peak-era Live on the new album, esp. "Suffering"

i mean, isn't all pop music, at this point, fairly mature and innovation/revelation is either "in the details" or in small incremental moves?

― Daniel, Esq 2, Wednesday, 19 March 2014 17:49 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what I'm up against huh

listened to about 15 minutes or so of this album and it was much, much more dull than 'spacerock tom petty' made it sound :( tom petty had some fukken jams. anyway, opinions vmic, keep on keepin' aor, ilx