It goes without saying that we live in chastening times, hemmed by news either fake or bad or both, meaning there’s little respite for thinking people from the global bonfire of our humanity.
At the most risk of collateral damage are the arts, increasingly subject to conformity and harried by reactionaries who regard their provision of a home to writers and performers from backgrounds in the margins of society as akin to sheltering cultural traitors.
These borderlands are a dangerous place to be these days, but to an extent it’s always been easier to critique something from the outside looking in; how do these conditions change for people still fascinated by stories, insiders conflicted for instance by America’s ability to love unconditionally, even if this warmth is only for itself?
As leader for over a decade of Philadelphia based outfit The War On Drugs, Adam Granduciel is just such an agent provocateur, a songwriter in thrall to some of the country’s millennial-spanning institutions – Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, a Sunday morning Bruce Springsteen – whilst fronting a band which the New Yorker recently hailed are now ‘the best American rock band of this decade’.
High praise indeed, and on the follow up to the welcome, if unlikely commercial breakthrough which his/their third album Lost In The Dream constituted in 2014, A Deeper Understanding, Granduciel throws off any final concessions to indie pretense, accepting the role of muse to his country’s tenderest grand assignations with aplomb.
This sense of voyeurism characterises most of the world’s relationship with its exterior, hence when you learn that the album was recorded in LA perception colours; at over eleven minutes Thinking Of A Place sounds like an archetype of the imagined relationship most of us have with California, it’s palm trees and sunsets, the lengthy guitar interlude seeming to ring off the canyon walls that enfold the trans-urban sprawl, the woozy harmonica drifting like smog.
If this sounds like torpor, or imprecision, neither could be further from the truth. In an age when technocrats are calling the end of the album, Granduciel has had the balls to make a record that clocks in at well over an hour whilst refusing, on songs like the dynamic opening couplet Up All Night and Pain, to give up the energy of the blacktop nervous system through which the continent’s spiritual essence flows. Equally, despite the soft edges and tenderness which come with making a cradle for your home, there’s a gravel in his words and an occasional starkness to his vista; on the latter he “saw a man with a broken back”, whilst on the slightly maudlin closer You Don’t Have To Go he mourns a relationship’s disintegration where “the hurt is much too real”.
In a sense, A Deeper Understanding is all about relationships – ours with each other, Americans with their own identity, the fractious present with a misrepresented past – so when on Knocked Down the listener hears, “far away there is a star/Raining through the night sky like a drop/Give ’em all a piece of the moon for me”, maybe it’s a call for the human race to seek enlightenment elsewhere. If such a journey is required, The War On Drugs’ fourth album could be its soundtrack. This is an American band making America great again in the truest sense of the phrase, a vital slogan before its hijacking by fascism, a quest heralded by voices from the country’s grand, ridiculous, nostalgic soul and its sometimes epic, beautiful heart of lightness.
Musically a backwards looking leap forward, these evocations should catapult its creator into the driving seat of his endless road trip, the blacktop headed straight for horizons he may up to now only have dreamed of.
