#2585 The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

There's something perfect about this album, like Oh Inverted World, like Is This It, like Since I Left You -- like those early indie glimpses of the Production Era, where we could have these records that existed just outside our conception of their making. This has the makings of those slow-growing classics.

It's not that there's anything blindingly spectacular here. But it's a crystallization of the War on Drugs sound, taking the highlights of Lost in the Dream and scattering them across a runtime. It's the meandering patience of Neil Young, the wandering of Springsteen at his most desolate, some version of Dylan that deigned to speak plainly about his lot.

And it's all over that punchy motorik, that beat leaning forward 15 degrees when its going fast and when its going slow, that road overgrown with lush, perfect production, swelling with a thousand pianos and strums and restless bass and subtle chimes and twinkling electronics and sneaky ferocious guitar lines. Nothing steps out of line, but the collective force is overwhelming, especially when you're long-conned into vulnerability to those guitars. There's nothing virtuoso about them on the face of it, but they'll take out each of your shaky knees.

That cover photo's perfect, Granduciel looking over a shoulder, maybe a little surprised, bloomed by too little light, surrounded by the implements of sound. He is you, when you get in there. This is our Steely Dan maybe, with a dash of Dire Straits, likely to be victim to various waves of backlash, but the purest, most affecting thing around if you open yourself to it 4.5/5

-- update 1/25/18

It's funny how this feels like every War on Drugs album, like the only one there ever was. For better or worse. It sands off the highs of, say, Under the Pressure, but raises all boats on the sea of sentiment. Nothing here surprises, but that weary, human, pulsing, striving energy comes through.

When a band's __thing is to be the sustain on your life's one note, maybe a pernicious consistency aint such a bad thing. Keep me rolling War on Drugs, as the beautiful nerds I went to college with might say, one day more