I don’t want to overstate this point, but it’s important to start here: If you were at The War on Drugs last night, you weren’t at CHVRCHES.
And that’s not like, say, Styx and Future Islands playing in Omaha on the same night, different shows for grossly different demographics. You could slap “indie” on both of last night’s bands, different as they clearly sound. While plenty of 20-somethings got sweaty at Sokol Auditorium, plenty more in that same age group (and plenty of 30-and-40-something, too) gathered to see The War on Drugs at The Waiting Room. Probably 98 percent white and 70-75 percent men.
Now, The War On Drugs’ new album Lost In The Dream is a bold and terrific exploration of Americana atmosphere that many-an-older stadium act probably wishes he had the patience to execute these days. But it’s invariably more terrific if you’re the sort of person who believes music’s present pinnacle is still a man with an electric guitar.
That’s not meant to be a criticism. That’s just who was at the show, including me, mind you. Totally by choice.
It was a laugh when a drunk patron yelled during Califone’s opening set, “Get into it people! I didn’t come here to see you nod your heads!” Wrong show, then.
What The War on Drugs provided to a sold-out Waiting Room crowd was a certain type of intimacy with a certain type of music they might never experience otherwise. Save maybe The Hold Steady, if you’re looking for a first-rate sound in the Springsteen/Dire Straits/Petty/rock ‘n’ roll Dylan-brand of charging Americana, you probably won’t find it in a place with fewer than 15,000 seats.
There’s beautiful ambiguity to Lost In The Dream and to The War On Drugs, in general. Songs roll into one another and frontman Adam Granduciel bristles (often indecipherably) in the same nasally timbre. All of it’s faded, all of it’s distant and all of it rushes through seven-minute songs toward a place at which it may never arrive. “An Ocean Between The Waves” feels first and foremost like a song about being in an ocean of guitars and keys. “Under The Pressure” feel like a song about being under the pressure of infallible, driving drums. Their actual, in-song tangibility was never necessarily under consideration, so much as an absolute mastery of soundstage. The hazy ambiance surrounding voices and guitar solos last night was remarkably close to what you’d find on Lost In The Dream.
In their opening set, the well-liked, veteran Chicago band Califone exuded textured weariness — guitars played with fingers slides, the exhausted refrain from “Funeral Singers.” Frontman Tim Rutili even asked the Waiting Room crowd, “Where are we tonight?” When he sang, he hunched close to the mic, and when it came to solo he shook off that slouching pose and attacked the guitar with ferocity that took visible effort to conjure. Even if the result was on point.
For The War on Drugs, the baritone sax of noted brass player Jon Natchez barreled the songs forward like they existed between the axels of a careening 18-wheeler in an eternal dawn. Natchez even panned the instrument back and forth in front of the microphone to simulate the experience of a moving soundstage. Across a two-hour set, new songs were born with grandeur. Even if they were two-chord verses, that acoustically could have resembled John Mellencamp, multiple keyboards incited them like intros to IMAX movies.
When Granduciel and company covered Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue” in their encore to the largest crowd response of the night, it was musically sharp and stuck a perplexingly perfect landing with the audience.
I remember The Lumineers being roundly criticized on social media (and in the crowd) for covering Dylan at The Pershing last summer. The difference is both simple and complex. The Lumineers are an indictably saccharine take on throwback folk, and Adam Granduciel puts on Philly cool every single day, like his denim shirt was acid-washed by interstate wind and union labor. What’s harder to talk about is how most of the 350 people who gathered last night deemed The War On Drugs an appropriate heir to Dylan, or at least a channel of transference they’d accept: rebellious-sounding, emotional-sounding, beautiful-sounding. As a version of American music? Familiar enough, status quo enough and wholly aloof enough to love.
