Adam Granduciel has been transformed from another plaid-shirted US indie musician into something approaching a rock star – a tentative one, uncertain of the spotlight, but a bandleader capable of pulling 10,000 people to his shows – by combining two impulses. On the one hand, there’s the version of him that made the first War on Drugs album, Wagonwheel Blues – a man in thrall to the freewheeling music made by beloved of and made by 70s heads. On the other, there’s the Granduciel who loves the sleek and shiny sounds of 80s pop rock – on second album Slave Ambient, Granduciel hit on the idea of throwing motorik pace and rhythms into his MOR and classic rock mix, and came up with a style he’s been revisiting and redefining ever since.
It’s easy to understand why some people who snigger that the War on Drugs sound like Bruce Hornsby and the Range with more guitar solos. (In some ways, Hornsby is an apt comparison – he, too, saw the attractions of slick MOR and the endless jam, and let’s not forget that he played keyboards for the Grateful Dead.) On tracks such as Holding On and Nothing to Find, Granduciel’s gift for melody (which is what brings those big crowds to the shows) is welded to a propulsiveness that summons up the horizon at the end of a long, straight, flat road. But A Deeper Understanding, the band’s fourth album, was more than music for the drive-time hour.
Granduciel doesn’t deal in obvious themes, or a clear notion of time or place: the War on Drugs convey a sense of open-endedness, both in the leisurely way the songs unfold and in his lyrics. He doesn’t ever know what he’s writing about until he steps back from the songs. “I don’t think that, in the moment, I’m ever trying to write about anything specific,” he told me earlier this year. The writing on A Deeper Understanding was simply the result of him getting older, and accepting the decisions he had made.
That gives the album an air of overwhelming but vague melancholy, the kind we all recognise. Yet for all Granduciel’s well-documented problems with anxiety and depression, it never tips over into anything more disturbing. Instead, the War on Drugs summoned that most delicious of moods: autumnal, slightly hungover, just a little sorry for oneself. The 11 minutes of Thinking of a Place captures that mood perfectly, right down to the solipsism of its refrain: “I’m moving through the dark / Of a long, black night / Just moving with the moon.” Meaningless, but perfect.
Nevertheless, there is one nagging question: how long can Granduciel keep this up? It seemed astonishing that he could drag a third album out of a sound that, in its own way, is as focused as the Ramones. Where do the War on Drugs go next? Straight to the middle of the road – or into space?
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