Music: The War on Drugs

Jeff Hemmings on Adam Granduciel’s latest dream of an album

Fantastic name for a fantastic band, The War on Drugs is, as well all know, the Mother of All Lost Battles, but in the hands of Adam Granduciel and co, it is a completely nondescript way to describe what they sound like, except perhaps in describing the pointlessness of pigeonholing their music, in the same way that it is a losing battle to fight drugs. As he has said: “My friend Julian and I came up with it a few years ago over a couple of bottles of red wine and a few typewriters when we were living in Oakland. We were writing a lot back then, working on a dictionary, and it just came out and we were like: ‘Hey, good band name!’ So, eventually when I moved to Philadelphia and got a band together, I used it. It was either that or The Rigatoni Danzas. I think we made the right choice. I always felt though that it was the kind of name I could record all sorts of different music under without any sort of predictability inherent in the name.”

There’s been a hell of a lot of good press regarding their recent album, Lost In the Dream, which represents their third long player, representing a great story about long-term artist development. It’s a major advancement on anything else Granduciel has done – four- and five-star reviews abound – and its fresh mix of 70s and 80s sounds have struck a chord with the alt-indie fraternity.

Granduciel met up with Kurt Vile back in 2003, and in 2005 they set out making music together as The War On Drugs, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the first fruits of their musical relationship saw the light of day in the form of the Barrel of Batteries EP, and the subsequent debut album, released on the Secretly Canadian label that same year. Vile left soon after, and with an ever- rotating cast of musicians, The War on Drugs developed slowly but surely, their second album Slave Ambient released in 2011. The ongoing cult success of Vile has helped the band to gain some traction, and here we are in 2014, with a Top 20 album in the bag, an album that will inevitably be in many of the best of end-of-year lists.

Emotive, and a little psychedelic, Lost In the Dream is a result of a very long recording process, thanks to Granduciel’s perfectionist tendencies, and has also been called both expansive and claustrophobic. You can hear echoes of Tom Petty, Lindsey Buckingham, 80s Brit pop, Bob Dylan, Spaceman 3 and Germanic motorik rhythms, the restless and dense quality of music made appealing by a strong sense of good songcraft. Somehow, Granduciel has combined good old-fashioned truckers rock with something altogether more adventurous – and the result is a beauty.

Wed 25 June, Concorde 2, 7.30pm, £16.50

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