The War on Drugs: a wrestle to the death
If there’s one adjective which has almost entirely dropped out of the lexicon of music criticism over the past couple of decades, it’s ‘Dylanesque’. It’s perhaps not unrelated that the albatrossian concept of x or y singer-singwriter being billed as the ‘new Dylan’ seems to have died a death too – the last one I can think of is Willy Mason, and that already felt like a bad joke at the time. I don’t think it’s just down to the vagueries of fashionable references, or even to the average age of today’s music writers – ie coming of age during post-punk and so in the main turning to that era for comparison rather than the 60s, which was the automatic point of reference for their predecessors. No, it genuinely feels that on an absolute level, there have been way fewer bands and singers using Dylan as a obvious influence during the past 20 years than at any time since Blown’ In The Wind was released in 1963.
On the face of it, this is quite a blessing. For such a immensely important artist, Dylan’s influence has been pretty fucking hideous. Either its a pointless facsimile (like this actually rather brilliant but shameless ripoff by Mouse), crushingly banal (the Byrds’ endless jinglejangle cover versions), or fist-chompingly embarrassing (almost every god awful protest song ever, a litany of which is provided by Dorian Lynskey over here). It’s now got to point where the artists themselves have learnt the valuable lesson from the classic scene in the 1966 documentary ‘Don’t Look Back’, where Dylan, who throughout the film has become increasingly irritated by reviews comparing Donovan to his own pre-electric incarnation, finally snaps. After Donovan, who has turned up in Dylan’s hotel room for an aftershow party, has forced the assembled audience to listen to his asinine song ‘To Sing For You’, Dylan grabs the guitar, and with a look of visceral contempt, starts singing ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. It’s one of his meanest songs anyway, but the moment he leers at Donovan while singing ‘You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last’ easily ranks as one of the most uncomfortable in ‘rock history’. It took a few decades, but it now feels as if most bands and songwriters have decided that the safest reply to Dylan’s offer is a simple ‘thanks, but no thanks’. Perhaps this is the sign of a truly great artist – that it’s almost impossible to take direct influence from them without making a fool of yourself.
So when the first blogposts and reviews of The War on Drugs’ debut album ‘Wagonwheel Blues’ started cropping up in 2008, liberally sprinkled with words like ‘mouth organ’ and ‘nasal sneer’, it came as something of a surprise. Somewhat refreshing too: certainly a contrast to the watered down post-punk or ‘new rock revolution’ that had dominated the decade’s guitar music thus far. But the warning signs were flashing – the last thing the world needed was another artfully-constructed but fundamentally artistically-empty retro band, let alone one aping Dylan.
But while, from the very first harmonica line of first track ‘Arms Like Boulders’, the reference to Bobby was clear, it was such an obvious nod that it must have been deliberate – the band letting us know that they knew that we knew what they were saying here, and that unlike Donovan et al, they would not be bowed by the comparison. And the record, while not flawless, achieved something which very few bands who consciously reference one of rock’s A-listers manage. It took a classic, instantly recognisable sound, and pushed it on. Wagonwheel Blues grabbed the Dylan template and coloured it in with a sonic palette (yuck) that could only have been created by a band who had taken onboard the lessons of the music created after him. Unlike most ‘retro’ bands, The War on Drugs did not aim to replicate their hero and then act as if music stopped with him. This was a band who had listened to post-punk, to Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, who knew their way around the post-rock canon, and were not afraid to inject that 80s and 90s experimentalism into a sixties framework. When it succeeded, as in ‘Needle In Your Eye’, it was nothing less than thrilling. As the now defunct (so I paraphrase) blog A Little Electricity put it – ‘the wonder is why no-one had thought of doing this before’.
Founder member Kurt Vile left the band soon after the release of Wagonwheel Blues, to concentrate on his equally superb solo work. So it was left to singer Adam Granduciel to carry the weight of the follow up record. It has now arrived – Slave Ambient is released this week. Remarkably, he has succeeded in repeating the trick, to such a great extent that I think it has singlehandedly resurrected ‘Dylanesque’ as a term of praise, rather than contempt. But even more impressively, it has managed to reduce Dylan to the position of ‘just another influence’. Rather than the echoes of the Dylan sound towering over everything else, making it impossible to listen to without the image of his curly mop laying waste to anything in its path, Slave Ambient has integrated the influence so successfully that it is now barely discernable. Tracks like ‘Brothers’ and ‘It’s Your Destiny’ have distilled mid-60s Dylan down to such an extent that it has become a kind of atmospheric presence surrounding the songs, something that you know is there but find difficult to put your finger on. Added to the mix are melodic bits and pieces from Springsteen (the opener Best Night in particular), instrumental drone interludes that take their cues from Spritualized’s early records, and throughout it all, the insistent motorik rhythms of the great kosmiche bands (best heard on the spectacular ‘Your Love is Calling My Name’. And oddly, despite these debts to past bands and records, Slave Ambient does not sound like an overly obvious retro record. The literary critic Harold Bloom wrote of how the weight of the achievements of past greats bear down upon the shoulders of those who follow, and of how artists must “wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death”. The War on Drugs may not have dealt Dylan the killer blow, but they have surely landed a punch to the jaw that few have previously even attempted.
