As with the last two Japandroids album, Wild Heart has stark black-and-white picture of the two guys in the band on the cover. With Wild Heart, Japandroids have taken every pain to make sure we know that they’re the same band, that they’re not getting big heads. This is clearly a meticulously planned-out album they’ve considered every misstep they could’ve made and avoided just about all of them. Near To The Wild Heart Of Life threads the needle admirably. It’s so easy to just Xerox a past album’s successful sound, or to leap headlong into heedless experimentation. Album number three is traditionally a perilous point in an artist’s career. They’ve slowed down that sprinting-into-the-sun momentum a bit, but they’re not trying to insist that they’re grown-ups now. With the new one, Japandroids have kept that same kids-down-a-desert-highway feeling, but they’ve brought in new dynamics and arrangements. The new album isn’t the fiery end-to-end headrush that Celebration Rock was, but honestly, how could it be? Any attempt to replicate that feeling would’ve just resulted in diminishing returns. Japandroids have pulled off something exceedingly difficult: They’ve kept the roaring, simplistic sound of the first album, but they’ve found subtle ways to expand that sound, to open it up. Has a great record ever been so out-of-step with its cultural moment?Īnd let’s be clear here: Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is a great rock record. And then, though no fault of their own, that album is hitting the internet one day before a terrifying despot takes control of the United States federal government.
They’re waxing rhapsodic about nights at the bar and nights in bed with someone you love and America, giving us an album full of joy and possibility. Right now, they’re coming out with an ode to falling in love and living on the road and throwing caution to the wind and getting drunk with your friends. They took nearly five years to craft its eight songs, and they put a ton of work into making an album that bursts with romance and exhilaration. So they take that follow-up about as seriously as they can. For their second album, they achieved such a perfect distillation of their sound, a rock record so nourishing and exciting and fun, that it was hard to imagine that they’d ever hit those heights again.
0 kommentar(er)
