B.C. duo sticks with what works
TORONTO – Sometimes, an indie band riding a maelstrom of hype from a rough-hewed debut will get a little carried away on a sophomore record — producers are hired, edges are polished, bloat is tolerated. Not so for Japandroids.
Following breakthrough noise-pop pounder Post-nothing, the band changed virtually nothing. Celebration Rock — in stores this week— features the same two people recording in the same Vancouver studio with the same engineer wrapping the same number of songs in the same comfortable coat of fuzz. In a bizarre coincidence, it even has almost the same run-time, differing by only 30 seconds.
And it sure is fitting for a group that has made its name on anthems of arrested adolescence to greet musical maturity with stubborn defiance. But frontman Brian King says the band had simply grown so much in the past three years since releasing their debut, they didn’t need to change anything else.
The man who describes the band’s breakout debut as “sort of an accident” says he finally became confident in what the duo was doing. “When we were first starting … we literally had no idea what we were doing. Arguably, we still don’t,” King said in a recent telephone interview from Vancouver.
“(But) we were confident that we had gotten so much better at not only writing songs, but also just playing our instruments … and that coupled with the fact that Jesse (Gander) is a light-years-better recording engineer now than he was three years ago, we just knew we didn’t need to change the formula to make a better record.”
Early reviews have been breathless, with taste-making Chicago zine Pitchfork lavishing the “awe-inspiring” record with its rare “best new music” distinction and Rolling Stone calling the disc “one of the year’s most thrilling rock records.”
It’ll all be familiar to fans of the duo’s superlative debut. Guitars are strummed furiously, King hollers as if he can’t physically contain the words any longer and somehow the band arrives at pop bliss more often than not, particularly on the wistful Younger Us and downright belligerent The House That Heaven Built.
“It’s very easy for us to recognize that while we might only do one thing well, we do do that one thing pretty well,” King said cheerfully.
“There are just certain songs in the set that garner a reaction from the audience. For us, Young Hearts Spark Fire (is) an obvious one. So the idea was, let’s try to write a whole record that garners that kind of response, so when we play shows on tour — instead of having these peaks on the set, it’s just one continuous peak because you’re just like, assaulting people with that feeling that they love, and they don’t even have a chance to rest.”
After issuing Post-nothing in April 2009, King quit his job, ditched his apartment and sold most of his possessions or sequestered them in storage as he geared up for the band’s first major tour. After exactly one show, everything came to a halt after he suffered a perforated ulcer — a potentially fatal condition.
He was in the hospital for two weeks, then at his mom’s house recuperating for another two months.
King and drummer David Prowse charged back out on tour before he’d really recovered. It was a “little premature,” but it’s hard to detect any regret in King’s voice. It was the road that sharpened the band’s skills and finally gave them confidence in what they were doing.
“It’s not just friends or friends of friends at our shows anymore, it’s people you don’t know who actually like your band in the way that you like other bands,” he said.