Last week on The X Factor, a contestant performed a slow version of George Michael’s Fastlove, which was pleasant yet utterly pointless. The song’s genius is that its form – joyful music hiding lyrical pain – so perfectly matches its function: someone trying to smother misery with ephemeral pleasure. Turning it into a Christmas advert ballad ruins the surprise of its sorrow.
There are no shocks in the sadness of the War on Drugs’ music. Sometimes it lurks in the layers, sometimes it oozes out of American singer-songwriter Adam Granduciel’s wistful vocals, but it’s always there, whatever speed or style of song. Still, Granduciel’s best work also offers exhilarating catharsis, which explains why his decade-long studio project has become a slow-burn phenomenon, culminating in this ambitious, largest-ever UK headline gig. Alexandra Palace is a collection of beautiful, imposing Victorian halls with stunning views of the city, but its high ceilings and challenging acoustics have defeated bigger bands than the War on Drugs.
When the band sidle on stage, looking like any six thirtysomethings picked from the audience, it feels like our yearning for one last great rock band has yet again shoved unwilling introverts into an arena’s unforgiving spotlight when they’re still mentally stuck at club size. Then they gently unspool the piano-driven In Chains, one of the many ruminative, mid-paced songs from their latest album, A Deeper Understanding, and it’s as if the north London palace’s walls immediately vanish into an American sunset.
Although you can hear a spiritual similarity to Granduciel’s heroes Springsteen and Dylan, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any specific song that’s been plundered. Instead, the template established on 2014’s breakthrough collection Lost in the Dream calls for sure-footed, relentless rhythms underneath drifting, melodic reveries, and song after song occupies the same terrain. Granduciel has somehow managed to create a whole distinctive, seductive soundworld on his own, and assembled a talented group largely capable of recreating it, without becoming predictable or overfamiliar during the course of a two-hour show. Like a stunned bird, the band circle uncertainly around the same areas but never land in the wrong place.
The one exception comes just before the encore. They’ve always struggled to deliver the damaged grandeur of their best song, Red Eyes, on stage, and tonight’s no exception. On record, Granduciel’s vocal falls away halfway through into a series of yelps, keens and half-articulated exhortations, as if the effort of feeling all these emotions is so great that it overwhelms any attempt to form the words to describe them. Live, some of the song’s musical power survives, but it’s rushed and unsatisfactory, the band failing to reproduce the recorded version’s vocal mix that leaves Granduciel gasping for breath as he’s swallowed in the swell of sound. At home, the closing lyric “I can see the darkness coming” seems apocalyptic, but here it sounds like someone’s thinking of turning the light off in a Tesco stockroom.
What really works is the elongation and improvisation that teases out the magnificent surge and ebb of Under the Pressure, or the pocket epic Thinking of a Place, two songs that last nearly half an hour between them. The searing solos of Strangest Thing are also a wildly received diversion. Largely, though, Granduciel eschews huge, memorable riffs or rock star flamboyance – when he introduces the band he is careful to point out that he isn’t the lead guitarist – and although he’s recently abandoned improvised lyric writing in favour of a more grounded technique, the words he sings tonight are still largely gnomic and impressionistic, dealing in broad splashes of emotion.
What matters more than the words is the accumulated feeling; intimacy on a grand scale. It’s hard to see how a band this reticent, this unstarry, could get any bigger or better, but it’ll be fun watching them try.
