By Josh Hughes
Since you’re obviously an avid reader of the AS Review, you’ve spent months, years scanning your eyes down the “Top Ten Records” on KUGS of the week. Looking for something you’ve yet to hear or hoping to see one of your favorite records of the year on the list, it’s a handy way to showcase what students around Western have been jamming to lately. While the heydey of college radio rock has certainly passed, KUGS lets us hold on to the excitement of being part of an alternate space where Alvvays and John Maus replace Imagine Dragons and Ed Sheeran on a hypothetical Top 40.
With that in mind, this is the start of an ongoing column where I will give a quick review of the number 1 album at KUGS for the past week, starting with The War On Drugs’ excellent 2017 release “A Deeper Understanding”:
Adam Granduciel is the brainchild behind glossy rock group The War on Drugs, and his latest album under the moniker progresses the impeccable production of 2014’s “Lost In The Dream”. Granduciel’s songs still play out well past the five minute mark, include krautrock influenced guitar breakdowns and run with the electric charge of a caffeinated Bruce Springsteen, but this time around there’s an even more noticeable sense of absolute perfectionism. When the songs soar and creatively build momentum, as they often do, there’s a pervasive feeling that Granduciel spent hours and nights pouring over the smallest of elements to achieve his exact vision. This is calculated rock for slow nights.
Songs like “Thinking of a Place” and “Pain” rank among The War On Drugs’ best songs, each taking at least two minutes to reach a first chorus. “Place” specifically, at 11 minutes, centers the album and immerses the listener in a series of ‘80s swelling synths and harmonica solos. But where a jam band might self-indulge in an exercise like this, The War on Drugs refrain from overstimulation and bombast. Never in the album’s hefty 66 minutes does an arrangement cave in on itself or overwhelm.
The album’s biggest fault, then, lies in its melodic elements. While most tracks bring a unique groove to The War On Drugs’ impressive back catalogue, certain songs like “Nothing To Find” show the band falling too heavily on their past achievements. Yet even when a guitar line sounds uncannily similar to something you’ve already heard, Granduciel soaks the whole album in a hazy mist that feels both approachable and strangely alien. For such a conventionally influenced group, there’s really nothing else that sounds like The War on Drugs right now. “A Deeper Understanding” does little more than delicately improve and modify the tried and true formula of the band’s last LP, but it’s also likely their strongest record to date.