Immediately after is I Don’t Live Here Anymore, in which he bids farewell to being “so afraid of everything” and embraces “a chance to be reborn” the melody nags at you all the way home. Under the Pressure, one of the standouts from his 2014 breakthrough album, Lost in the Dream, documents the merciless death throes of a relationship the screens either side of the stage show Granduciel’s worn boot about to stamp on an effects pedal as the band go up to 11. His emotional arc could just about be squeezed into a pair of back-to-back tracks that take this gig to its climax.
In recompense for all those edits, Granduciel adds in a wistful haziness and a sore but beating heart, worn on a frayed sleeve. Natchez’s sax is a rhythm instrument, rather than a lead, adding texture to the warm thrum and enveloping oscillations of this immersive band. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The ObserverĮven at arena scale, he actually leaches the bombast out of Springsteen, excises the archness of Dylan and cinches in the girth of Young’s noodling. ‘An experiment gone right’: the War on Drugs at the O2 in London. “Am I more than just a fool?” he wonders typically on An Ocean in Between the Waves, where the undeniable pep of the band’s rhythm section is offset by the languor of Granduciel’s guitar.
His rock is not muscular, but questioning. His obsessiveness and sincerity are very much part of the allure of the War on Drugs, while his personal struggles act as a prism through which all of his influences pass. Even if the nosebleed seats are curtained off tonight, this is the band’s second time at the O2 since Granduciel’s outfit won the best rock album Grammy for their 2017 album, A Deeper Understanding.īut it’s hard to imagine the affable Granduciel as some retromaniac evil genius, tenting his fingers, plotting his assault on the stadium circuit. He was signed by Atlantic, a major label around the same time, producer-mogul Jimmy Iovine saw no reason why the War on Drugs could not be a “gigantic” win-win all round. “We played this song at Corsica Studios maybe 10 years ago,” notes Granduciel at the start of the rousing Come to the City from 2011’s Slave Ambient, the record that raised his tousled, bleary head above the slacker rock parapet. This band’s dad-rock dog-whistles and rock canon Easter eggs have been spectacularly effective, calling several generations to him, catapulting this scruffy guitar obsessive from tiny clubs to arenas in the space of a decade.
To call Granduciel unoriginal, though, would be to miss the point of the War on Drugs, an experiment gone right. Granduciel leaches the bombast out of Springsteen, excises the archness of Dylan and cinches in Young’s noodling His firstborn is, of course, named Bruce. Granduciel’s lyrics, too, have long tussled with the darkness at the edge of self, with anxiety, lack of certainty and romantic loss played out against an American landscape of rivers and roads, memories and dreams.
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All that homage is as nothing, however, to the tributes paid to Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band by War on Drugs’s jubilant keyboards – played chiefly by Robbie Bennett – and Jon Natchez’s blaring saxophone plus the 80s thwack of Charlie Hall’s drum kit (multi-instrumentalists Anthony LaMarca and Eliza Hardy Jones, and bassist Dave Hartley, complete the lineup).