Photo credit: Benjamin Wick
While they’ve had to wait a while longer for recognition than Kurt Vile, who co-founded the band before leaving to pursue a fruitful solo career in 2009, Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs has had a pretty good go of it the last few years, with 2011’s Slave Ambient and the new follow up Lost in the Dream finding favor with critics and audiences alike. What’s even more impressive is that they’ve managed it with a sound that’s not exactly fashionable these days, recalling an era when heartland guitar rock was first meeting the smoothed-out textures of 1980s production. Sure, there’s some slight shoegazing going on around the margins, but overall they have a nostalgic accessibility that is extremely easy to like but, as Sunday night’s show demonstrated, is just as easy to grow bored with.
Not that the crowd at the Pabst Theater, an impressive one for a Sunday night, post-Packer game no less, was likely inclined to agree, though their reactions were curiously muted over the course of the evening, which started with openers Califone. The Chicago outfit, who trade in a heady blend of post-rock, dreamy psychedelia and sensitive alt-country, have generally been rather prolific but, prior to 2013’s Stitches, hadn’t released a fresh studio album in four years. Here they showed off some of the newer material, including the fragile lead off track “Movie Music Kills a Kiss,” but also dipped into their back catalogue, most memorably for “Funeral Singers” from their previous release, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, the companion piece to frontman Tim Rutili’s directorial debut of the same name.
As The War on Drugs took the stage, at first only bandleader Adam Granduciel was illuminated, opening the show solo with Lost in the Dream’s closer, appropriately entitled “In Reverse,” before being joined by the full group. The setlist was varied, highlighting the new album but also touching on things like “Arms like Boulders,” a throwback to their 2008 debut full-length Wagonwheel Blues, but the issue is the music itself isn’t as dynamic. There were striking moments, mostly whenever Granduciel let some more grit into his ringing guitar tone or some subtle electronic elements sidled into the mix, but their default mode of hazy Americana pop, while affective in small doses, grows somewhat tedious over 90-plus minutes. They’re certainly good at what they do, but what they do only goes so far.
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