Japandroids – Celebration Rock – 2012
“We yell like Hell to the Heavens!”
Who says rock is dead?
Okay. Maybe rock is dead. Maybe no one wants to play it on the radio anymore. Maybe.
But, there’s something about bashing barre chords and hitting drums as hard as you can and rousing teenage boys and girls to jump around in front of a stage.
Too many bands are more interested in being effete and musical or hypnotizing their fans into a subdued trance state.
And then there are Japandroids. A couple guys out of Vancouver (By the way, BC rocks. Black Mountain, anyone? AC/DC recorded their last one there. Something about that city of glass) who rock harder than The Gaslight Anthem or The Darkness or, hell, just about anyone.
They aren’t slaves to old tropes and yet they use classic metal tropes to make their points. Case in point, the accentuating cymbal crashes of “Evil’s Sway”, who’s chorus will have you adding Tom Petty’s “American Girl” to your playlist (Trust me, just listen to it).
The sounds that Guitarist Brian King and Drummer David Prowse make could tear down any stadium roof. They are Monsters of Rock in an era when so few want to blow the doors down.
At 35 minutes, Celebration Rock is just that. A celebration of rock. Of music. It’s joyful and chaotic and messy and explosive. Everything Rock is supposed to be. Honestly, if it lasted any longer it would be bloated with filler. Because this is the perfect amount of time to spend with this music.
Celebration Rock closes as it opens: with the sounds of actual fireworks. Which aren’t as epic as the movies make them out to sound but that’s the realness of fireworks. They aren’t explosions of a Star Wars-ian scale. They are dry and hollow and there’s real beauty in them because they are jarring and so very very ephemeral.
That’s Celebration Rock.
Its a party record by way of assault. But it’s not dumb. No, not dumb at all. Imagine if Titus Andronicus could find a way to trim 5 minutes off some of their epics.
So, Rock isn’t dead.
The Hold Steady may have gotten exhausted being the only band of its kind in a Bieber/Perry pop world, but they just kicked down the door for Japandroids. And The Gaslight Anthem. And Titus Andronicus.
Grade: A
ASide: Days of Wine and Roses, Fire’s Highway, The House that Heaven Built
BlindSide: Evil’s Sway, Adrenaline Nightshift
