There is a new Japandroids album out today. It is called Fate And Alcohol. It is also the final Japandroids album. So now, I will give them their eulogy.
Japandroids are (were) an indie-rock duo from Vancouver. They were composed of Brian King (guitar, lead vocals) and David Prowse (drums, “whoa-oh-oh” vocals). They formed in 2006 and released four studio albums, one live record, and one compilation. In the early 2010s, I loved them intensely. I even started a podcast named after their most famous album. At some point, I transitioned to liking them. And then I shifted again, to my present “fondly remember the period when I used to care about them” status.
It’s customary in situations like these to recall the first time you saw the deceased. For me it was at South By Southwest in 2010. I was at an art gallery somewhere in Austin. Behind the building there was a makeshift stage abutted by a small bar serving free (or maybe it was severely discounted?) drinks. When I arrived, The Rural Alberta Advantage was on stage. I don’t remember any of the other bands on the bill. It’s possible the show was Canadian-themed, but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me. I was, after all, more interested in the drinks than the music.
Then Japandroids went on. They were the reason I was there. I liked their first album, Post-Nothing. And I enjoyed their American TV debut that January on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where they whipped through my favorite song from the record, “Wet Hair.” Now, I was about to hear Brian King holler about going to France to French-kiss some French girls in person.
They were good. Not great. Not revelatory. But good. And instantly sweaty. After the second or third song, they both looked like they had played four quarters against the 1989 Detroit Pistons. King bounded about the stage while sending splatter-buzz guitar licks at the audience, and Prowse bobbed eagerly on his drum kit as he kept erratically perfect time. In my mind, I predicted that they would release exactly one more album, and that album would receive a 6.8 from Pitchfork and instantly evaporate from existence. And that would be the end of Japandroids.
Flash forward two years. I’m sent an advance promo of the second Japandroids record. It’s called Celebration Rock. I put it on and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It sounds like the record I would make if I were in a two-person band from western Canada. They sang about hanging out with buddies like it was a revolutionary act. They wrote about romantic relationships with the fevered intensity of a mid-seventies Bruce Springsteen song. Their instruments collided into one another with the style and grace of a blackout drunk Replacements bootleg. It was like they were trying to recreate the feeling of listening to every cool part from every cool classic rock record, simultaneously, only with limited funds and limited ability.
That was the thing about Japandroids: Even when they were great, they were really just good. But they elevated “just good” to an art form. I’m not going to repeat the tired punk mythos about how “anyone can do this.” But Celebration Rock connected with a certain kind of rock fantasist because Japandroids were ordinary guys who seemed to have stumbled into brilliance. It made you think that anyone could rock this hard with the right combination of self-actualization and intoxication. Even the cover communicated this idea: These dudes didn’t look cool or exotic, they were just two bookish Canucks decked out in scarves and glasses. They were uniquely not special.
There was a misconception about Celebration Rock in the media that shaped how Japandroids were written about and contextualized forever afterward. They were looked at as a party band, because the songs were, well, celebratory. But Celebration Rock did not take place in the present tense. They were talking about their past lives. Or “Younger Us,” to quote the album’s pivotal track. King and Prowse were both 29, which is the age when your sense memory of high school and college starts to fade. Eventually, you can only remember what happened back then, but you no longer feel what it’s like to be young. Most of us react to this by pouting melodramatically about “becoming old” as our thirties loom. Japandroids reacted by making Celebration Rock, an orgasm of last-ditch adolescent sentiment preserved in amber.
I was five years older than Japandroids, and I adopted their orgasm of last-ditch adolescent sentiment as my own. When the tour was announced and I saw that they were playing in my area one month before my first child was due to be born, it seemed almost too perfect. This is my last show of pre-fatherhood? Oh, and it’s also taking place on the first day of summer? The circumstances were simply absurd. The circumstances were simply a Japandroids song.
The concert was … not good. The songs sounded about 35 percent less powerful in person. And they stopped after each one for what felt like five minutes, as King painstakingly re-tuned his guitar and spouted interminable patter. It was as if the schism between reality and fantasy concealed by the album was finally revealed on stage. The truth about Celebration Rock is that it wasn’t what it sounded like, which is two guys bashing out eight songs over a six-pack in just one or two takes. It actually took an eternity to make and might not have come out at all if not for a record label edict. King, in particular, was a perfectionist who worked at a snail’s pace. Ultimately, the album he and Prowse made was, weirdly, a studio construction, like if Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had labored for months and spent millions to make Aja sound like Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash.
Five years later, I saw them again. It was an interview for the podcast I named after Celebration Rock, on the tour bus their new label, Anti-, presumably paid for. Most of the questions were about their new LP, Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, which was dinged in some quarters of the critical community for feeling anachronistic in our bad, new Trump Era. I thought this criticism was preposterous then, and I think it’s preposterous now. It’s like complaining about how Deadpool & Wolverine did not thoughtfully address the Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict.
But to be fair, my review of Near To The Wild Heart Of Life has not aged well, either. “To put it in Springsteen terms,” I wrote, “Celebration Rock is Born To Run, and Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is The River.” Is Near To The Wild Heart Of Life really Japandroids’ version of The River? I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t listened to it since 2017. Japandroids for me was still the band that made Celebration Rock.
I’m stalling on getting to the end of the story. So, here it is: Fate And Alcohol is the first Japandroids album since then. There will be no tour bus interviews this time, as there is no tour. All we have is the record. And that leaves only one relevant question: If you loved Celebration Rock, do you need to hear Fate And Alcohol?
Let me put it this way: How you feel about this album will hinge on how you feel about going to your own high school reunion. Are you interested in seeing your old classmates decades later, or would you rather preserve the memory and pretend that those people (and you) never got any older? I fall solidly in the former camp, but professional obligation nevertheless required me to violate my personal code for Fate And Alcohol.
It’s a clumsy record. The sins of their past — try-hard corniness and conspicuous self-consciousness, which are evident even on Celebration Rock — have not abated. The songs are (still) populated by starry-eyed fellas and the ladies who love them beyond all logic and reason. I’m thinking specifically of “Positively 34th Street,” in which King sings, from the perspective of one of those ladies, “I don’t bet on boys / they just love you, leave you blue / but make it to my doorstep, I might roll the dice on you.” In the immortal words of Roger Murtaugh: I’m getting too old for this shit.
And yet, in spite of everything, Fear And Alcohol moved me. The critical flaw in the makeup of Japandroids as a creative vehicle is that it was designed to do one thing — make Celebration Rock — and not mature or evolve one iota beyond that. But they lurch forward anyway on this record, and even if it’s not always (or often) successful it feels nevertheless courageous. The bravado and romanticism are still there, but it’s shadowed this time by a recovering addict’s fragility. “You’re not dead, just dehydrated,” King sings in “Alice,” and you can practically feel his fists locked in a white-knuckle grip.
My feelings about this record were inevitably informed by the recent profile written by my friend and colleague Ian Cohen, in which King talks candidly about his newfound sobriety. “Our fans have this image of us at the top of the ‘dudes rock’ pyramid. Escapism has always been a big part of our appeal and I think they take comfort in the idea that at any given moment Dave and I are out there somewhere dudes-rocking together,” King says in the article. “Whereas in reality, we live in different countries, thousands of miles apart, and rarely see each other. There was definitely a long stretch of our lives where we were daily dudes-rockers, but those days are behind us.”
If Celebration Rock was about distilling youthful emotions into musical form as they rapidly slip from your heart, Fate And Alcohol is about outliving the fantasy and finally putting it behind you. This is necessary in life, and decidedly less than thrilling in rock. But at some juncture, life must take precedence. For them, and for us, too.
And with that, we must bid Japandroids adieu. We all loved in your shadow, dudes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, whoa-oh-oh.
