War on Drugs performing on the David Letterman show
It’s not often you get to see a band this good play a venue this small.
When we rock up to get in I’m gobsmacked to see they haven’t sold out this venue. I suppose they mustn’t be getting much, if any, airtime on radio.
Anyhow I couldn’t be happier to see War on Drugs in such an intimate setting and we bustle our way up closer to the front once the four-piece come on stage and open up with “Brothers”, one of the stand out songs from their new album, the critically acclaimed Slave Ambient.
Lead singer Adam Granduceil seems up for it, and Phil Spector would be proud of the wall of sound that rolls out over the crowd as the tempo builds like an oncoming freight train during the second number “Your Love is Calling My Name”.
War on Drugs play the kind of music that needs to be heard live and they achieve the improbable by melting all their influences into an original sound.
Lead singer Adam Granduceil
They may be from neighboring Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but War on Drugs are like the Ohio of American music – a place where east, west and southern influences meet and explode. You can hear Dylan and Springsteen bumping into Tom Petty and southern Americana with an undercurrent of Seattle scuzziness.
While they don’t have that ‘sing-along-with-me’ mid tempo sound, “Come To The City” is a rollicking head nodder that comes as close to being ‘sing-along-able’ as War on Drugs get – and we get a few full-throttle “whoas” from Granduceil in this number – a treat a couple of our crew have been anticipating.
They’re cranking mainly through the new album but after a couple of crowd shoutouts they head back to song number one from the first album – the sublime “Arms like Boulders”. I thought the earlier “Baby Missles” would be the night’s highpoint but this song has an energy live that turns it into a crescendo and gets the biggest reaction– although it’s a somewhat muted crowd given the experience the band is giving to it tonight.
What turns out to be the closer is “Needle in the Eye” – a ripping closer that live is a real stomp that bursts out of the album version of the song into a 10-minute epic. The band leaves the stage for what I assume is a breather but then everyone starts to file out. Hang on! What’s going on here? No encore? I can’t remember a band not playing an encore except Ryan Adams on his petulant ‘dark room’ tour.
It’s all a bit of a let down. I need an explanation and go peek behind the curtain just to make sure that’s it before we follow the rest of the crowd on their way out. Yep, they’re packing up. It was a bit of a dull crowd; maybe they just weren’t feeling the love.
Just over an hour was all we got, but it was some hour.
