The War On Drugs // Cargo, 13 September 2011

Pumping gas in a desolate thoroughfare. Eating ‘grits’ in a sinister trucker’s café. Being chased through overgrown backwoods by a toothless gun-toting simpleton in dungarees. Yes, the image of the fabled ‘life on the road’ in America is as informed by Kerouac/Twin Peaks/Texas Chainsaw clichés as ever; constructed from hand-me-down Springsteen albums and copies of low-budget Alabaman horrors. Fortunately, one gang who don’t take such dim-witted notions on-board is The War On Drugs – bona-fide Americans who have birthed the soundtrack to the most fucked-up psychedelic road movie you’ve never seen in ‘Slave Ambient’.

Considering they’ve made one of 2011’s finest albums, you could be forgiven the band would introduce themselves with a chest-beating, ostentatious fanfare. Not so. Their on-stage demeanour is certainly inauspicious, and their ‘banter’ consists of chat about guitars and, erm, jeans. Still, TWOD are all about the music – free of the soaked-in-oats, plaid shirt bullshit that such a horrific phrase evokes.

And what music: they filter the best in ‘heartland’, Uncut Magazine favourites – Neil Young, Dylan, The Boss – through a shoegaze filter, pebble-dashing it with Krautrock blobs. At their best (‘Your Love Is Calling My Name’) this seemingly hellish prospect is seamless, like Route 66 gently shifting into the motorik rhythms of the Autobahn. The FX-soaked ‘Come To The City’ and ‘Baby Missiles’ might not have any choruses as such, but are peculiarly catchy all the same, featuring some gloriously shabby harmonica stabs and some dazzling wig-outs. There’s still a certain traditionalist, porch song air at times (‘I Was There’) and Granduciel’s voice (an amalgamation of Dylan and former TWOD bandmate Kurt Vile) is somewhat reedy, but they’re still a great deal spacier than most. The bleeding-knuckle encore is certainly more Hawkwind than Tom Petty.

Indeed, while The War On Drugs may happily flirt with the some of the facets of ‘respectable’ American music – the backdrops of mountains and open-road, their relaxed stoner disposition, song titles like ‘Buenos Aires Beach’ – theirs is a novel take on seemingly rigid source material, like frazzling an old photographic slide under the sun. When their fuzzy road-trip winds up in your town it may not roll-up with all guns blazing, but they’ll quietly go about their business all the same. This is a thing of ragged glory. Join the crusade.

Originally appeared in CLASH Magazine