The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

The War on Drugs
Lost in the Dream
18 March 2014
Secretly Canadian

4 stars out of 5

 

Adam Granduciel’s band The War on Drugs has made a couple of very good records since the departure of Kurt Vile (not to slight Vile at all—his solo stuff is great): 2011’s Slave Ambient and now Lost in the Dream. The new LP is a lovely piece of work, full of relaxed but vital mid-length songs that unfold naturally into abstract guitar paintings. It’s definitely music you can zone out to—it can have the same sort of mesmerizing effect as a good dub album—but it has enough interesting details that a close listening is equally rewarding.

The opening track, “Under the Pressure,” is almost nine minutes of pure bliss: one gets the feeling that if Don Henley could have ever done anything worthwhile in his career, it would have been but a feeble imitation of this song. Its mid-‘80s vibe works seamlessly with its mid-‘00s instrumentation—layers of delays on both guitar and piano, a near ambient drone of an ending—to form something very mid-‘10s. “Suffering” slows things down to a funeral march, but one that shimmers with cathartic guitar release and an affirmative, steady groove. “An Ocean Between the Waves” and “Disappearing” keep up the extended ambient-ish rock explorations, while “The Haunting Idle” is an exercise in full-on beatless ambient guitar textures. “In Reverse” successfully merges the ‘70s American rock anthem à la Bruce Springsteen with some sounds that could be made by a guitar version of Autechre. (Hold on, I just have to think about that for a moment, because it’s so bizarre. But it’s true.)

This is a very good record, alllllllmost as good as Kurt Vile’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze. Sorry for making the comparison, but it’s what I’m forced to do in this business: compare things, decide which one is better than the other. You, gentle and forgiving reader, may have the freedom to be as heedlessly subjective as you desire, but I, alas, have no such right or privilege. I’m forced to assign an abstract number (in this case a 4, meaning “very good”) to these things, and that’s never easy. Listening to and enjoying this record is incredibly easy, however, and I recommend that you do that at your earliest convenience.

reviewed by Richard Krueger