Post by account_disabled on Nov 14, 2017 7:35:45 GMT 1
In his early songs, Bruce Springsteen wrote about machines. Cars were always there to the point of cliché, but he also wrote about howling factories and creaky amusement park rides and record players and undefined contraptions filled with flame that waited for you ominously on the edge of town. His interest is easy to understand. Machines take you places and inflict things upon you, and machines also rust and break down and remind you that time is passing and death is always near.
The singer and songwriter Adam Granduciel, who leads the War on Drugs and who is often compared to Springsteen, arrives at similar terrain from another angle. If so many of Springsteen’s songs were about machines, War on Drugs’ music is a machine. Granduciel’s work finds its meaning in the totality of its sound, in how writing and arranging and perfecting every detail in the studio is part of building music that carries you with it. His way of understanding the world is to use that sound machine to excavate and explore his interior life and hopefully shape it into something listeners might understand, even when he’s not entirely sure where he’s going.
True to the project’s nature, the War on Drugs’ albums aren’t reinventions, they’re more like a new model in an established line—a Mark IV that adds a few features and continually refines the engineering. On A Deeper Understanding, his first album for Atlantic, the synths get an extra twinkle, the bass-led builds get another octave of rumble, and some songs have a dozen instruments on them where they once might have had seven or eight. “Holding On” is packed with piano and celeste and a chugging acoustic, but the entire song is wrapped around the heavenly slide guitar from Anthony LaMarca and Meg Duffy, which uncurls like a plume of smoke and steals the song like a Robert Fripp solo. The arrangements throughout are mind-boggling, and if Granduciel leans slightly away from the explosive anthems punctuated by an echoing “Whooo!” that made Lost in the Dream so special, the extra attention to craft makes up for it.
A Deeper Understanding is also a fascinating study in influence; it’s hard to think of a band with more obvious touchstones that also sounds so original. Over his last two records, Granduciel has chosen a very particular slice of music history—mid-’80s rock made by baby boomers with synthesizers—repossessed it, and built a new world within it. Like the music from that era, A Deeper Understanding is all about contrast, the push and pull of rock grittiness and authenticity, while the layers of keyboards and studio sheen give the music a dreamier quality, suggesting the kind of imaginary spaces dreamed up by future-obsessed ravers. There’s a thread of Granduciel’s music that extends from something like Talk Talk’s ”I Don’t Believe in You“ from their 1986 album The Colour of Spring and winds through later incarnations of sun-kissed guitar pop, or even producer M. Vogel’s opulent edit of Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest.”
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The singer and songwriter Adam Granduciel, who leads the War on Drugs and who is often compared to Springsteen, arrives at similar terrain from another angle. If so many of Springsteen’s songs were about machines, War on Drugs’ music is a machine. Granduciel’s work finds its meaning in the totality of its sound, in how writing and arranging and perfecting every detail in the studio is part of building music that carries you with it. His way of understanding the world is to use that sound machine to excavate and explore his interior life and hopefully shape it into something listeners might understand, even when he’s not entirely sure where he’s going.
True to the project’s nature, the War on Drugs’ albums aren’t reinventions, they’re more like a new model in an established line—a Mark IV that adds a few features and continually refines the engineering. On A Deeper Understanding, his first album for Atlantic, the synths get an extra twinkle, the bass-led builds get another octave of rumble, and some songs have a dozen instruments on them where they once might have had seven or eight. “Holding On” is packed with piano and celeste and a chugging acoustic, but the entire song is wrapped around the heavenly slide guitar from Anthony LaMarca and Meg Duffy, which uncurls like a plume of smoke and steals the song like a Robert Fripp solo. The arrangements throughout are mind-boggling, and if Granduciel leans slightly away from the explosive anthems punctuated by an echoing “Whooo!” that made Lost in the Dream so special, the extra attention to craft makes up for it.
A Deeper Understanding is also a fascinating study in influence; it’s hard to think of a band with more obvious touchstones that also sounds so original. Over his last two records, Granduciel has chosen a very particular slice of music history—mid-’80s rock made by baby boomers with synthesizers—repossessed it, and built a new world within it. Like the music from that era, A Deeper Understanding is all about contrast, the push and pull of rock grittiness and authenticity, while the layers of keyboards and studio sheen give the music a dreamier quality, suggesting the kind of imaginary spaces dreamed up by future-obsessed ravers. There’s a thread of Granduciel’s music that extends from something like Talk Talk’s ”I Don’t Believe in You“ from their 1986 album The Colour of Spring and winds through later incarnations of sun-kissed guitar pop, or even producer M. Vogel’s opulent edit of Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest.”
For more you can check
brand videos