At the end of last year, I saw this New York Times article snarkily lamenting the almost-death of major-label rock music. Just as I was starting to become indignant at the focus on major-label, Wal-Mart rock (Foster the People, Nickelback), I came across this sentence: “The fringes remain interesting, and regenerate constantly, but the center has been left to rot.” So Jon Caramanica had heard The Hold Steady, Fucked Up, Wild Flag, and probably Japandroids.
I’ve been listening to Japandroids’ Celebration Rock almost exclusively since it started streaming at NPR’s website, and I bought the album on the day of its release last week. Just to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I listened to it during my run yesterday along the Promenade in Long Branch. As an aside, Best Coast can say what they like about California being “The Only Place,” but this Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-raised guy will take a sunny day on a New Jersey boardwalk any day of the week.
Japandroids are Brian King (guitar, vocals) and David Prowse (drums, vocals) and hail from Vancouver, BC. In 2009 they released Post-Nothing, intended as the swan song for a band that they felt was going nowhere. That album, a collection of pop-punk, almost emo anthems, received wide acclaim and extended the life of Japandroids. For Celebration Rock, Japandroids have turned their focus a little bit away from themselves, and the result is a magnificent rock and roll record.
Heaven has been a theme around here for the last week or so. The subject of last week’s review, The Walkmen’s Heaven, comes from the point of view of a veteran band who have been making albums for over a decade and whose members now have families and children. Celebration Rock concerns itself with heaven as well. Only this time, we get the perspective of a young duo, at the beginning of their career, who sing lyrics like, “Busting my guts on a riot dose of paradise.”
The album opens with the sound of fireworks. From there, “The Nights of Wine and Roses” opens with the question, “Don’t we have anything to live for?” The answer: “Well of course we do, but until they come true / We’re drinking!” It pretty much goes on from there. On both “Fire’s Highway” and “Evil’s Sway” with its Petty-esque “Oh yeah! Alright!” you get the feeling of being part of the audience shouting back at the band. The cover of The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy” doesn’t work as well as the band’s own songs, but the album’s second half, featuring soon-to-be classics “Younger Us” and “The House that Heaven Built,” is as good as any stretch I’ve heard on an album this year. At the end of album-closer “Continuous Thunder,” we get those fireworks again.
The influences of bands like The Replacements, The Hold Steady, and even Bruce Springsteen are obvious, even though the songwriting has a way to go lyrically before it measures up to Westerberg or Finn. For some, the one-note sound of power chords and drums could get tiresome, but Japandroids have kept Celebration Rock to a manageable thirty-five minutes. For me, a recovering rockist, the emotion and how real it feels is enough to carry Celebration Rock and to make it feel, well, celebratory.
Head over to Polyvinyl Records for a full album stream, and see what you think.
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