The War on Drugs
Live Drugs Again
SUPER HIGH QUALITY
It almost feels piggish that The War on Drugs would release yet another new live album with but one studio production between it and 2020’s Live Drugs. Yet bandleader Adam Granduciel is all about genuinely evolving this seven-person ensemble’s recordings, stretching their studio-tanned skins and rearranging the guts from (and, often, adding new melodies to) the most carefully placed elements of I Don’t Live Here Anymore, Lost in the Dream, A Deeper Understanding, and Slave Ambient.
Regarded as dreamy post-psychedeliacs with an existentialist’s lyrical aplomb and a hard-driving rhythm section (bassist Dave Hartley, drummer Charlie Hall), you’d never confuse The War on Drugs with, say, Grateful Dead—not live, and certainly not in the studio. To be bold about it, there’s something much clumsier about Granduciel & Co. (including their recent live-only addition, singer and keyboardist Eliza Hardy Jones) than there is about the gatekeepers of psychedelia. Maybe it’s that the Philly-based ensemble has the hometown advantage of gutsy, grooving swagger, as opposed to the Dead’s taste for free-jazz jams and country-bumpkin blues.
The War on Drugs inject an earnest, youthful enthusiasm in these live versions, as well as an overheated panther’s sense of stalking—something you can sense as they pour their hearts into older tracks such as “Burning,” now done with reckless, freak-show abandon and golden, potent vocals, or even a newer song like “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” which now seems more grandly anthemic than on its original studio take. That aforementioned rhythm section tucks into the pocket of “Harmonia’s Dream” as if they’re on a mission, burrowing deep into its groove while the rest of the band colors outside of every line, from verse to chorus to bold-as-light bridge. Something similar happens, too, on longer, blissed-out cuts such as “In Chains” and “Under the Pressure,” or blunt reveries like the cut-and-not-so-dry “Slow Ghost.”
If The War on Drugs keep at it, they’ll be the best live band in America—or at the very least its most self-curated.
