Can Japandroids Save Rock ‘N’ Roll (Again)?
It’s a former tradition that has eroded completely over the course of the last few years and seemed even rare at that time: I hopped in my car in June 2012, drove to a mom and pop record store, and bought a CD. In retrospect while currently sitting in the “pay $10 per month to stream any song ever” era, it seems like an unnecessary expense when I was very clearly just going to rip the CD to my computer, load the tracks up on my old, clunky iPod and leave the CD in my car for the occasional drive through the summer heat.
The music on this album demanded this type of antiquated process though. It was a new release, but decidedly old school both aesthetically and sonically: Celebration Rock by Japandroids. Its 35-minute, eight-song length conjures up images of rock epics like Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and The Replacements’ Let It Be. It does so for good reason. Japandroids have become the torch bearers of the 2010s for the once-thought-dead genre of “I will pump my fist and scream and drink until huge guitars and even bigger choruses save me” rock ‘n’ roll, something I’ve taken to calling “shoot for the sky” rock. Hell, the album opens with the lines, “Long lit up tonight/and still drinking/don’t we have anything to live for/well, of course we do, but until it comes true/we’re drinking.” The duo of Brian King and David Prowse are wearing their hearts and spilt beers on their sleeves throughout.
This style has its roots in the Springsteens and Pettys and Jaggers of yesteryear: music intended to be played at Wembley Stadium or sold-out arenas that would become classic rock radio staples and teenage anthems long after those musicians passed their primes. Japandroids’ songs aren’t much different. The “Ohhhhh yeahhhhhh! Alrightttttt!” scream-along chorus from “Evil’s Sway,” the album’s third track, is an obvious callback to Tom Petty’s signature tune, “American Girl,” a song still powerful and iconic enough to have dive bar patrons downing their drinks and karaoke singers ripping their vocal cords more than 40 years after Petty and the Heartbreakers penned their ode to the girl who had one little promise she was gong to keep even if she had to die trying.
The band has gone silent since its best tribute to rock’s eldest statesmen, but other releases have followed in its wake in recent years: Titus Andronicus’ The Most Lamentable Tragedy, PUP’s The Dream Is Over, Pkew Pkew Pkew’s self-titled album, The Hotelier’s Goodness, and Cymbals Eat Guitars’ LOSE. These albums stray from the “trying so hard to seem as if we’re not trying at all” ideology that has dominated indie rock for the last 20+ years since Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted in 1992. This is the type of music the world’s biggest bands would make if guitar-driven rock was still the mainstream’s genre of choice. It’s not, so the songs are relegated to club shows of just a few thousand (or hundred) people instead. While these are all great works, none truly replicate the intensity or hat-tipping to rock’s golden age quite like Celebration Rock.
So why are Japandroids relevant right now in August 2016? The summer of 2012 produced that year’s two best albums, Celebration Rock and Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. Both acts fell off the face off the earth within the next year with no public interviews as to why (Japandroids infamously has a Twitter account that’s never tweeted before). Since last summer, Ocean has played a continuous back-and-forth “will he or won’t he?” game of teasing an album assumed to be titled Boys Don’t Cry. Earlier this month, it looked like Boys Don’t Cry was no longer destined to be the 21st-century R&B version of Chinese Democracy, as Ocean began streaming himsef oddly doing carpentry work in black-and-white footage on his website. When no album dropped over last few weeks, it looked to be just another fake out from the soulful crooner until last night’s surprise release of the visual album Endless. As Uproxx’s Steven Hyden poignantly pointed out yesterday, if it took Ocean over four years to meticulously craft an R&B opus, how has it taken even longer than that for Japanroids to crank out 30 minutes of balls-to-the-wall soaring guitars and crashing cymbals?
The answer may be coming soon, as the band recently announced tour dates scheduled for Canada, England and parts of the United States for the end of this year and probably a second leg of the tour in early 2017, a shocker since they haven’t played live since 2013. Will a new album follow? It’s likely, but unlikely that their new tunes would sound exactly like and hit me the same way like their original masterpiece did in 2012. After four years of partying, wondering “don’t we have anything to life for?”, hanging with friends who “were already in bed/said, ‘Fuck it!’ and got up to drink with me instead,” and telling “them all to go to the hell” when they tried to slow me down, my life has changed drastically.
I just hope it’s something that I can defiantly play with all of the windows down in my car and the volume cranked to max power, driving on I-76 or down through South Philly and feeling empowered that rock ‘n’ roll can save my life again. It would be a fitting addition to the the only two albums I keep in my car’s disc player, another antiquated notion, at all times: Born to Run and Celebration Rock, the former being the “be all, end all” to music and partying and living life to its fullest extent for my father and the latter being so for me.
