Billy Bob's Book Review Corner

After suffering brain damage from excessive drinking, I became illiterate and had to switch to reviewing passively consumed content. Please bear with me as I navigate these difficult times. This post was written in 2021 so ALSO also don’t get excited, there is STILL not a new War on Drugs album, other than the live album, which I haven’t listened to but is probably pretty good.

Today’s review is for The War On Drugs’ latest studio LP, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It only came out a week ago, and it’s generating a ton of buzz because their last album won a grammy, which was probably a little unexpected since everyone kind of assumed you couldn’t make a straightforward rock album that people actually gave a fuck about in 2017. That album, A Deeper Understanding, was, in my opinion, a top notch, amazing piece of work, but everyone who cares already listened to it.

My first impression of the new album is that it’s not trying to do anything particularly new. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly. The War On Drugs is primarily a vehicle to showcase Adam Granduciel’s singing and guitar playing. He sings every song, and he plays all of the meandering and lengthy guitar solos that more or less have defined the sound of the band up to this point. The other members are also there. Maybe that’s a little uncharitable, I guess. The guy who makes all the keyboard and piano sounds on this album and the last one is very good. But holy crap, their bass guy and drummer could put me the fuck to sleep even if I just shot meth into my eyeballs. I guess Kurt Vile probably left the band because Granduciel couldn’t stand being around anyone else with a personality.

Anyway, the reviews of this thing online are hilarious because they’re trying so hard not to admit it’s boring. This album had maybe the world’s most massive hype train ever behind it and people who make money for writing articles have had an extended boner for like a whole week waiting for it to drop. And it’s not a bad album by any means. The songs sound exactly like the War on Drugs. Granduciel is a really good guitarist. If you like this band, you’re probably tuning in for that. The title track is really good. He knows what he’s doing. But when your reviewers are talking about how you sound like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, or when Rolling Stone embarrassingly calls your album “Indie Yacht Rock” (not making that up, I swear) you might want to examine whether you are being a bit of a downer. And not in a cool depressing way like your dog died and you’re real sad and you wrote a bunch of songs about it, but more like you wrote 10 or 12 songs that people maybe sit through and nod and go yeah I guess it’s all right and then they forget about it and move on with their lives. Except me, I never forget and I especially never forgive.

Haven’t said much about what I actually don’t like about this album yet. Here’s my problem. Granduciel is a pretty predictable songwriter. That’s not the complaint. No problem with that, but I think these guys felt like they couldn’t just release another “Deeper Understanding”, since that already was just an extension of the sound of the album before it. But the songs are the same structure. There’s nothing to experiment with there. So in order to make it sound different they added some unnecessary harmonies and some irritating compression and other filtering on the vocals. It’s a striking difference, but not in a good way. So imagine your band wanting your new album to sound different, but you don’t have any new instruments to throw in or any other ideas. So you just buy some new plugins on protools or whatever and futz around with some knobs until all of your samey songs sound just different enough to annoy your fans for no reason. You have to listen to about 3/4 of the album before you realize why it’s annoying you, and once you do realize, you can never go back.

I probably just made a lot of people not ever listen to a band I really like. Billy Bob’s review corner, everyone.