The War On Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

Have you ever wondered what Bruce Springsteen’s music would sound like if it was 30% more depressing? Well now there’s a way to fulfil your bizarre and niche desire! The War Against Drugs’ fourth album A Deeper Understanding, sporting Adam Granduciel’s trance-like vocals and reverb guitar effects is at times hypnotic, at others bouncy and surreal, but always laced with a healthy dose of the bittersweet. What Granduciel understands better than most of his indie rock contemporaries is that songs are stories. He lets each track operate as a self-contained narrative, whilst simultaneously allowing themes, sounds and motifs to ripple through the album like a vast echo chamber. Notable mentions are Thinking of a Place, a gorgeous 11 minute meandering path of a song and Up All Night, a moving hymn to insomnia, depression and paranoia. Listening to this album, I kept thinking how it would make the perfect soundtrack for a road trip movie (preferably involving Johnny Depp smoking cigarettes with his long hair streaming out the Cadillac window). One criticism is that TWAD’s songs (an unfortunate acronym) often blur into each other drowsily and at times the album lacks innovative bite, resulting in a marshmellowy sound that I’ve decided to term Sleepy Rock.