SLAVES TO THE RHYTHMS The War on Drugs
Sep 22, 2011
Adam Granduciel didn't just set out to paint his masterpiece - he succeeded.
BY STEVE KLINGE
Slave Ambient, the second full-length from Philadelphia's The War On Drugs, is at least two albums in one. Heard one way, it's an opaque, textural work built on drones, loops and immeasurable layers of guitars both acoustic and electric. Heard another, it's an expansive, immersive set of road songs and heartland anthems. There's more than a little Dylan in leader Adam Granduciel's cadences and inflections, but there's also a lot of Spacemen 3 and Can and some Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco, and there are DNA affinities with Granduciel's friend and erstwhile bandmate Kurt Vile. It's one of those records that can strike immediately but that then keeps changing as one listens. It's sharp and hazy, restless and shimmering, dense and crystalline, all at once. It's something special.
Slave Ambient's 46 minutes play as a nearly continuous suite; it's criss-crossed with instrumentals that form bridges between songs, and there's an ebb-and-flow to the listening experience. Songs echo one another lyrically and instrumentally, so that the album - and Slave Ambient is definitely meant to be heard as an album - creates its own coherent, self-referential world. Although it doesn't sound labored, it's little surprise that Granduciel and his bandmates spent years creating it.
"A lot of the stuff went through a lot of transformations; we were all searching for the right spirit of each song," says Granduciel, between a pair of sold-out NYC shows the week of the record's release. "I wasn't really obsessing over it, but I was taking my time because I had an idea in my head of what I wanted it to be like."
Granduciel built Slave Ambient from the bottom up, starting by accumulating drones and guitar fragments that could be turned into loops. Songs grew from some of this work, but the initial idea was to create a lot of available material to embed within tracks. Friends and bandmates would end up jamming, and that could turn into a usable layer, the "ambient" elements of the songs. The effort was intense but disrupted: Granduciel would convene the band for short tours, or he would go on the road with Kurt Vile as one of Vile's Violators. Bassist Dave Hartley worked on a solo album as Nightlands, too (last year's excellent Forget The Mantra). At one point, Granduciel had an album ready for his label, Secretly Canadian, but then withdrew it immediately because he didn't feel it was ready.
"I knew right when I turned it in that it wasn't time yet. So, I was like, let's just wait," says Granduciel. "It was a situation where the final album did take a long time, but I wanted it to be something special, and also it took awhile to develop some of the songs. I wanted to make sure all the songs were strong. It wasn't like we were unable to wrap our heads around it. I think everyone understood that there was an idea there that was taking time to gestate, to go through the necessary failures to the desired end."
That desired end was something similar to Wagonwheel Blues, the Drugs' 2008 debut, but with more intent and artistic focus. Wagonwheel also used instrumental bridges and song reprises (as did the Drugs' two pre-album EPs, 2007's Barrel of Batteries and 2010's Future Weather), but Granduciel says they were "almost incidental" and inadvertent. "It was almost at first a lack of fully realized songwriting," he says, of Wagonwheel's interludes. But the overall effect, that sonic coherence, of Wagonwheel was something Granduciel wanted to repeat, although on a deeper level.
"I saw I wanted the next War on Drugs one to be similar to that, kind of expansive, and I like the way on Wagonwheel everything worked off each other, with the reprises and showing the process of recording a song, in a way," he says. "And so for this one, I like the fact that a lot of the songs actually echo each other in weird melodic ways. They're all kind of tied together in. It's not like twelve individual tracks; they all live together in this weird little family."
The War on Drugs - Baby Missiles by edin2sun
Ambient is even more unified than Wagonwheel, and the songs are more consistent. The creative process was intuitive and unstructured, at least at first. Granduciel spent a lot of time accumulating fragments and loops - guitar filigrees, rhythmic fragments, tones and drones - and they ended up forming the bedrock of a song. Rather than having the textures flow behind a song, the song fit on top of the textures. The balance between the two is often equal: foreground and background meet in a wall of sound, especially on the anthemic set pieces "Your Love Is Calling My Name" and "Come To The City" and on the Neu!-like motorik instrumental "Original Slave." But although he used the loops to create the songs, sometimes he removed them from the final version of a song.
"I think it's key that it's never a situation where there's a song and there's these things flowing in behind it," Granduciel explains. "The songs are written from the ground up. I wouldn't actually know what song I was working on for a couple months, just working in the home studio, fucking with sounds. Then maybe over time I would develop a little sample that was percussive or obviously the backbone of a song, and then I would start adding over the top of it and playing with ideas. And then sometimes I'd use those ideas or maybe try it without all the loops and drones. I'd just try to do a song in different ways and see what worked best. ‘Come To The City' was like that. It has that really intense beat in the background. I did it in a few different ways, like in a stripped down guitar / drums way; I just kept trying to sort through all of them and find the right balance. I think that's what we were looking for."
The "we" in the Drugs has fluctuated drastically. Much has been made of Kurt Vile's one-time membership in the band, often as if Vile swore off the Drugs to start a solo career. It's more a case of a pair of friends sharing ideas and working together for years, and then each devoting himself primarily to his own project. Vile still plays on the new record, although not as extensively as he did on Wagonwheel; Granduciel plays on Vile's Smoke Ring For My Halo and tours with Kurt when he can.
"The musical relationship that me and him have had over the years, and the music we've made together, I think it's a really great story in a way," says Granduciel. "Sometimes I feel that it's a really great story that's been cheapened consistently, but that's to be expected nowadays. It's not even giving him enough credit really, saying that we started the band quote-unquote and that he left and had a solo career. That's cheapening his work. Because at the end of the day, we made a lot of music together for four years, five years before anyone knew who my band was or where his music was. We just did a lot of stuff together because we loved it and learned a lot from each other. Everyone searches for that one person who when you play together it's like a really magical thing. I feel like we have that. That's why I never stopped playing in the Violators, because the guitar relationship that me and him have is really a great thing."
Granduciel gets frustrated by the misconceptions of their history and their friendship. He calls it "the Kurt thing."
"I just feel like that it's reduced to that we don't even talk anymore, like, Are you guys still buddies? Come on, dude, do your research. I've been on tour with him.; it's still happening. He didn't quit the band and start a solo career. It was two friends helping each other out with their recordings, before we had record deals or people ever came to see us when we played. I would say, Dude, I got this song, and he would play this awesome guitar part on top of it. And he'd be like, I've got this tune, and I'd play on top of it. I don't know if people want that classic rock story of people quitting and going solo, but it's lazy work, over the years. But it's become fact in a way. You can't really go around commenting on people's blogs. You just got to let it live."
Vile's work isn't as sonically dense as is Granduciel's Drugs stuff, and Vile has a stronger slacker element (hence his recent partnership with J. Mascis). But listening to a song such as Vile's "Jesus Fever" with its trebly guitar interplay, it's easy to hear the affinities.
One can also hear connections in Hartley's Nightlands work: although Mantra is a purely solo work, it's densely layered and artfully constructed.
"I'd say the Nightlands stuff is probably influenced and informed by what Adam does, but through the eyes of someone who listens to a lot of ELO and the Beach Boys and Squeeze and shit like that," says Hartley.
Currently, Hartley has the longest tenure in the War on Drugs, having played on a few Wagonwheel tracks. Keyboard player Robbie Bennett and drummer Steven Urgo contributed to the record and are in the touring band. But Granduciel is the mastermind.
"There's no question that it's his baby, and he was the only one who really knew what the big picture was. We were all instruments of his vision," says Hartley. "It's weird. I feel like the War on Drugs is really collaborative in the sense that we're constantly jamming with each other, and listening and layering. But it's not collaborative in that there's not a lot of discussion about it. There was never like a powwow, like we should go for this kind of vibe. It just sort of happened, by years of repetition."
The recording process was so attenuated, with players coming to Granduciel's home studio to jam and add ideas which, according to Granduciel, would sometimes "totally change the direction of the song." But ultimately Granduciel and co-producer Jeff Zeigler constructed the songs from all the formal and informal sessions. Because the process was so extended and improvisatory, even the players sometimes have trouble hearing themselves in the final product.
"I could look at the credits and know where I'm credited, but if I didn't have that, I would listen to it and say, I don't know if that's me or what because there were so many things recorded," says Hartley. "Especially on things like ‘Baby Missiles' and ‘Come To The City' and some of the really really dense ones like ‘Your Love Is Calling My Name'-which has become my favorite track - I don't know, I listen to that stuff, and I know I'm on there somewhere but I couldn't tell. That's the cool thing about the density: it's really dense but it's not busy, if that makes sense."
Rather than layers playing off busy layers, Slave Ambient flows, with those layers working wave-like together - maybe it's a wave of sound rather than a wall? - and details like the slightly out-of-phase double-track vocals on "Brothers" or the shifting guitars sounds in the Dylanesque ballad "Black Water Falls" adding depth, even if they're not noticeable on a casual first listen. Songs weren't really finished until the whole album was finished. Some albums feel get there coherence from an intense burst of work - they were recorded in a few days, and that focus produced an aesthetically related set of songs - but in this case, everything slowly accrued at the same pace.
"I don't know that anybody could have dealt with working on it all the time with me," says Granduciel. "A song we started two and a half years ago, over time we were always adding to it, remixing it. I was always adding to new songs and old songs; so if I was working on a new song, putting some guitars down, I was like, oh man, this tone we got is fucking great, let's go back to ‘I Was There' and put a track down with this sound on that. I was always going back to them and making little adjustments and adding to the record."
No wonder the album took a long time to finish. A couple factors converged to finally get it done. Granduciel knew he was going to be touring with Kurt Vile in the summer, and the War on Drugs scheduled a tour opening for Destroyer for the spring, so they needed to finish the album by March. Co-producer Jeff Zeigler, who'd also co-produced Wagonwheel with Granduciel and Vile, was crucial in the final stages, says Granduciel.
"He did some recording of it over the years, but the last six to eight months when I was super-confused, he was like, Dude, let's finish this record. I know it's close. So, we worked on it pretty much from September through March, we just buckled down and finished."
And finishing meant not only completing the recording of individual songs but connecting the dots between them.
The War on Drugs - Come to the City by yvynyl
"Some cool stuff happened at the very end when we were putting it all together," says Granduciel. "I had ‘Your Love Is Calling My Name' and ‘Come To The City', and then ‘The Animator' that goes in between them was just something I was working on, but it was going to go behind ‘Come To The City' because it was in the same key. And I just kind of off-set it and made it its own thing and went, Oh sweet, we can link these three songs together. Then we looked at the whole twelve-minute thing and went through and made it so it didn't seem like it was just three segues. It wasn't a sequencing thing like where they were all done and we just cross-faded. We saw the possibility, and then approached the whole thing as if we were working on one song, which was awesome."
And that resulted in the awesomeness of Slave Ambient as a whole.
"It's great that it's reaching a lot of people and that people are coming out to see us. It's exciting for me and I think it's exciting for the other guys. Maybe year ago the record was in a strange place, but now it's out and to see people responding to it, it's great, it's awesome."
The War On Drugs are currently on tour in Europe. The U.S. tour resumes again in mid-October. View dates at the official website.
[Photo Credit: Graham Tolbert]
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