The Satellite was packed on Saturday night to see the Philadelphia band War on Drugs playing their long hypnotic numbers, flirting with a sort of Americana wrapped into a fuzzy psychedelia.
Frontman Adam Granduciel, who was wearing a pair of jeans torn up at the knees like the Boss used to and had long 70s hair, was sometimes singing like Bob Dylan or Tom Petty acting like Bruce Springsteen going on tiptoe to release some breathy lines, whereas the music worked like a very long road envisioned ahead.
Some of their songs were epic numbers, but nowhere close to Arcade Fire or Bruce Springsteen bombastic-epic, they were the opposite of anthems you can sing along to. Instead they were repetitive and hypnotic monotonous highways, never going overboard and seemingly going nowhere, but keeping their tangent with Americana.
It must be difficult to reinvent a style already done so many times, but with bits of Dylan-esque harmonica here and there, an acoustic guitar or a discreet Jackson Browne-style keyboard played by Robbie Bennett on some songs, they were building a really interesting composite atmosphere, which had the power to remind you many things at the detour of a riff or a guitar assault, alternately more Petty than Springsteen, more Springsteen than Young…
Some songs were like liquefied guitars, with vocals arriving by waves, others were executed in a more military style with an ascending sound bursting into something more powerful than the others. Most of the time, the different sounds of the instruments were wrapped so tightly that they were indistinguishable from each other, making the whole thing sound like a vertiginous swirl, where a trumpet was even infused at times.
I did not see any setlist, but read somewhere on the web they opened with ‘Arms Like Boulders’ from their 2008 album ‘Wagonwheel Blues’, but also played ‘Taking the Farm’ and ‘Needle in Your Eye’ from the same album, and ‘Baby Missiles’, ‘Best Night’, ‘Brothers’ from their very recent album ‘Slave Ambient’, and ‘Comin’ Through’ from their 'Future Weather' EP; however, the set was quite long and they must have played many other songs.
It was so long that Adam Granduciel needed more beers before playing their two last songs, and drummer Steven Ergo brought some bottles from back stage. Granduciel founded the band in 2005 with Kurt Vile, who is now going solo, and he could not have find a better pseudonym for himself – Granduciel means big from the sky in French – since the band’s music had this potential to open big horizons.
I had never listened to their albums and I must say it would have been helpful to have been familiar with their repertoire, as it was sometimes hard to make sense of their trance-inducing-roots-rock, but I am under the impression that their live renditions were a little different from their recordings, extended by long jams fueled by a steady drumming to keep going over a long, very long way.