By Nick Ubels (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: June 20, 2012
We fade in to the thundering kettle corn crackle of distant fireworks, the prophetic march of David King’s rumbling floor tom, and now the howling swell of amplifier feedback.
Japandroids go for broke with a brazen declaration of intent to open Celebration Rock, the maximally ramshackle Vancouver garage rock duo’s long-awaited follow-up to an impassioned debut. It’s a make-or-break moment for the band that left fans wondering whether they could muster the same vigour and visceral power of 2008’s Post-Nothing three-and-a-half years later. But any of my own anxiety about a sophomore slump is first diminished then deafened by the massively distorted wallop of Brian King’s guitar and opening vocal hook that could never not include the word “tonight.”
So what do “the nights of wine and roses hold” for our underdog heroes? A record that’s every bit as vital as its predecessor, but exponentially more confident, complex and accomplished. It’s a compliment to the band’s progress as song writers that the weakest track on the album is a cover of Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy.” It feels oddly small in scope alongside Japandroids’ widescreen punk anthems that sonically split the difference between The Replacements and Hüsker Dü.
Prowse and King are keenly aware of life’s ephemeral nature and the strain of memory. Yet it is not nostalgia they espouse so much as a resolution to never surrender, to take seriously Neil Young’s proclamation: “It’s better to burn out/ Than to fade away.”
Album highlight “Younger Us” doesn’t celebrate youth so much as memorialize it, even while it recedes irretrievably into the dark shadow of the past. Each moment of purely-felt exuberance is lit by the phrase “Remember when…” throughout the verse and followed by an ever-burning desire to relive those moments with the clenched fist manifesto of the echoing refrain: “Give me younger us.”
The song’s lyrics bear a slight autobiographical slant, memorializing the story of the band’s fiery second coming with the couplet: “Remember that night when you were already in bed/ Said ‘Fuck it’ and got up to drink with me instead.” It reminds the listener that Post-Nothing very likely could have been Japandroids’ first and only LP. Dejected and getting nowhere, the band had decided to call it quits after finishing their debut. But that’s when a flurry of sudden interest saved them from the brink of obscurity. Japandroids still aren’t taking anything for granted.
It’s clear that the band possesses an unshakeable, near-religious fervour steeped in rock and roll mythos. Their absolute belief, that they can achieve that one hotly pursued moment of transcendence with enough sweat-infused effort and a pair of Marshall stacks with dials glued to eleven, remains firmly intact; walls of guitar and shout-along choruses are a testament to their unabashedly earnest desperation. Celebration Rock scorns cool indifference and detached ennui with a blistering rebuke of “Whoa-oh-oh”s.
The album reaches its bold climax with the elemental crescendo of “The House that Heaven Built” and Japandroids shift down for the surprisingly tender mid-tempo closing track “Continuous Thunder,” which might as well serve as a concise description of the last 35 minutes. Celebration Rock ends with the familiar sound of fireworks fading into the background, this time signifying something else entirely.
One of the things that’s so appealing about Japandroids is the way their music implicitly affirms the importance of companionship with an abundant use of plural pronouns. When King and Prowse join voices to holler “We don’t cry for those nights to arrive/ We yell like hell to the heavens” on album-opener “The Nights of Wine and Roses,” I find myself unable to shake the feeling that the most important thing I could do right now would be to call my closest friends and stay up together all night.
Japandroids bleed the kind of conviction that makes you feel sorry for whatever act has to follow; you would be hard pressed to find a record, this year or any other, that captures this abundance of raw spirit with such acuity.
