People really love The War On Drugs. I am not one of those people.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the band’s music. I’ve seen them live before and thought it was alright, but as the band played the second show of a two night stretch at Massey Hall on Sunday night, I noticed a fair number of people who were way into the show in a way that I most definitely was not.
Is it me? Am I missing something or were people overreacting to a fairly average show?
If I was being generous (and if I was feeling the music in the way a lot of people were feeling it on Sunday night), I’d concede that The War On Drugs are really good at locking into a groove and just jamming it out and that the band’s latest, A Deeper Understanding, is an impressively crafted piece from a production standpoint. If I’m a bit less generous, I’ll admit that their jams are not always the most interesting and that over the course of a nearly two hour set, the songs all started to blend together, to the point where when the band was playing certain songs, I caught myself wondering whether I’d already heard them played earlier in the night.
Maybe I’m being willfully obtuse. Maybe I even kind of agree with Mark Kozelek’s “beer commercial lead-guitar” comment from a while back, even if he was being a total dick about it. Or maybe the band just didn’t put on the most compelling show. Of course that’s just, like, my opinion, man. Your mileage may vary.