Album review: I Don’t Live Here Anymore, by the War On Drugs
Adam Granduciel of War On Drugs, a band who've just released I Don't Life Here Anymore.
★★★★☆
War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel recently expressed reservations over how much longer he wanted to continue with a project which has conveyed him from indie obscurity to arena-filling fame. But if those rumblings were in earnest, and I Don’t Live Here Anymore is to be his group’s swan-song, he has at least bowed out in spectacular fashion.
The ingenious innovation of the War on Drugs has been to marry alternative pop’s streak of defence with the heartland values of Tom Petty, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen. And Granduciel blends these two influences to often dazzling effect on his band’s fourth album.
It’s a project brimming with a sense full of yearning but which sometimes comes at the listener out of leftfield. There are vast epic choruses and yet the project is also weighed down with ambivalence.
If this is the big time, then the impression is that Granduciel won’t miss it when the zeitgeist has moved on.
I Don’t Live Here Anymore opens on a muted note with Living Proof, a grungey rock song rippling with melancholy as Granduciel looks back in doomy nostalgia on his youth in Philadelphia.
But it immediately kicks up a gear with Harmonia’s Dream, a propulsive weepie named after the great Krautrock ensemble and which lives somewhere between Tom Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open and The Killers’ When We Were Young (and War On Drugs own 2014, break-out track Under the Pressure).
It will sound great on your stereo. Yet its true home is clearly the arena (War On Drugs play 3Arena, Dublin in April 22). That same sense of charging towards the horizon drives Wasted, where Granduciel sounds like a Millennial Springsteen dancing with the ghosts of rock’n roll past (We went to see Bob Dylan / We danced to ‘Desolation Row’,” he croons. “But I don’t live here anymore / And I’ve got no place to go”).
Power-ballads are another component of the War and Drugs arsenal. And Granduciel delivers a Neil Young-esque country-rock croon-along on Rings Around My Father’s Eyes. “I’ve never really known which way I’m facing,” sings the 42-year-old, who recently became a father for the first time. “But I feel like something’s changed.”
He sounds as if he’s ready to hang up his hat and try something new – which chimes with the overall sensibility of a record about growing older and seeing your hometown change. Should that be the case, War On Drugs fans will be encouraged to learn that he has signed off with perhaps the band’s finest album yet.
