Album Review: The War on Drugs- Lost in The Dream

The War on Drugs are the kind of band that my dad would probably listen to.

Wait. Let me rephrase that.

The War on Drugs are the kind of band my dad would have listened to when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s. My dad is, like, almost 60 now, and we are estranged, so I really don’t know what he fucks with when it comes to contemporary popular music.

I’m going to guess the members of WoD are roughly my age, or at least that we are in the same general demographic—products of the early 80s, coming of age in the 90s. The Internet is not helping me a ton when it comes to finding the exact birth years of the members of the band—former member and now solo artist Kurt Vile was born in 1980, so I'm just making an educated guess here.

The reason that age is important when discussing WoD is that the music they are making—specifically on their new album Lost in The Dream, would fit right at home in the landscape of music I grew up hearing on my father’s turntable.

This is not necessarily a good thing.

Because the Internet, when describing this band, music journalists and radio personalities on hip stations like 89.3 The Current have taken to tossing the term “Bossgaze” around, implying that WoD are a combination of sorts between Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, and shoegaze.

The funny thing is, I don't really hear either of those on Lost in The Dream. You give a guitarist a few pedals to fuck around with, and then suddenly everybody thinks they are in a goddamn shoegaze band. They aren't shoegaze in the classical sense of the word—Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive; and they sure aren't in the “nugaze” sense of the word—Brief Candles, LSD and The Search for God, Tamaryn, et. al.

When asking yourself what does the new War on Drugs record sound like, the actual question you should be asking is what DOESN'T it sound like. My initial observation was that it sounds like what would happen if Bob Dylan had tried to make a dream pop record. Lost in The Dream mixes a country and western twang, 1980s Top 40 Adult Contemporary, and then runs it through a few reverb and delay pedals. A song like “An Ocean in Between The Waves” whether intentionally or not, the driving rhythm sounds alarmingly similar to “Every Little Kiss” by Bruce Hornsby—or maybe it just sounds that way to me. Later on, the same creeping familiarity comes in with “Burning,” which reminded me instantly of “And We Danced” by The Hooters.

And overall, I kept catching lots of Dire Straits, and even some Traveling Wilbury vibes as the record continued, and then hearing faint traces of Ryan Adams (especially on the closing track), a little Cass McCombs, and even some Josh Ritter in Adam Granduciel’s vocals.

Strangely enough, in all of that, I don’t really hear any E Street Band theatrics or any of Springsteen’s earnestness. Although I guess in tracks like “Red Eyes,” one of the most straightforward and shortest in length on the record, I can see that with all of the “big” moments packed into it, listeners may erroneously make a comparison to the Boss.

For all of their nostalgic and slightly derivative homage payment, The War on Drugs come off as a band that take themselves too seriously, which is interesting because on their Wikipedia page, Granduciel claims that when naming the band, it was either between The War on Drugs, or The Rigatoni Danzas. I’m not implying that precocious, goofball humor like that belongs in “serious indie rock” like this, but Lost in The Dream paints a picture of a band that could maybe stand to lighten up just slightly.

Something is preventing me from enjoying The War on Drugs. I’m not really sure what it is. I like a lot of the things I rattled off earlier, so you’d think of someone where to put them all together, it would be something that would at least hold my attention. The idea of dream pop meeting country and western music sounds like a hot mess in the wrong hands. Lost in The Dream isn't so much a hot mess, but it is failing to make a connection with me.

The unfortunate thing about this record is that it isn't inherently bad, or displeasing to the ears. The band themselves seem to have quite a grasp on their skills, and as a unit, function very well. I stop short of saying there’s a lack of energy on Lost in The Dream, because some songs clip along at a faster pace, but I would say there’s a lack of heart. This album just kind of doesn't go anywhere. The songs are all rather lengthy—at times seemingly for no apparent reason; and overall, there is little to no momentum gained throughout the record.

In the end, I am nonplussed and unmoved by Lost in The Dream. The War on Drugs have crafted a seemingly “good” record, but to me, it is extraordinarily boring and for the most part, rather forgettable. Sure there are times when I was like “oh, that’s okay I guess.” The “emotions” that WoD tries to…emote…on “In Reverse” was one of those times. But I am left incredibly confident that this is a record I will rarely, if ever, be compelled to listen to for leisure. I may be making a sweeping generalization here, but it seems like the kind of record that will be repped hard by Public Radio, making it accessible to #cooldads everywhere, as well as repped hard by Pitchfork, therefore, capturing the attention of, as The National put it over a decade ago, “bedroom kids who buy it for that reason.”

In preparing this review, I tried to find what I thought I had been told was an Onion headline from many years ago, but I was unable to locate it. Perhaps I had been mistaken—but anyway, in college, I have a vivid memory of a friend of mine using the expression “Masturbatory Music Fails to Climax.” If I were to use only five words to describe this record, rather than the 1000+ I have exhausted here, those are the words that instantly came to mind.

If you are so moved, Lost in The Dream is available on March 18th, via Secretly Canadian.