For years, duos sought out bassists or guitarists to flesh out their sound and form a "real band," but once Toronto's Death From Above 1979 hit the scene in 2002, all of that went out the window. The bass-and-drum duo basically said, "Yo, what's up, we don't have a guitarist but we are going to rock you with sick bass lines and percussion," and that was that. A flurry of duos suddenly sprung up on the landscape of the neo-whatever world ruled by Pitchfork Media. Thus began the peak of the blog-boom, in which bands were made and unraveled in months and everything began to resemble the forgotten radio classic "Flavor of the Week" by American Hi-Fi. Like some bizarro version of the last scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, bands proved their mettle by disproving the hype, by either going against the praise or just not paying attention. Most music, sadly, simply became disposable and in the late '00s there was a great amount of recycling. Music bands served their purpose of being the It thing before being cast aside like the stacks of The DaVinci Code you see at used bookstores. This is Japandroids.
I was quite fond of Japandroids' debut, 2009's Post-Nothing. I even threw it on to my Pazz and Jop ballot at #10 as a placeholder that ended up sticking. It was a record that took me a long time to get into, but eventually, fantastic jams like "The Boys are Leaving Town" and "Young Hearts Spark Fire" became summertime anthems. Had they played the show they were supposed to play at the Replay last summer, I may have found their live show to be compelling. Hell, if the show tonight had been at the Replay for two dollars rather than at the Bottleneck for $15, things might have been different, because what I saw at the Bottleneck was a two dollar band playing a bigger venue at a higher cost because, well, at the moment they've got hype and their label (Polyvinyl) is milking it for all it's worth.
This was a boring show. I was expecting a band that was its own thing, and I got a slightly poppier version of No Age (a band who served their time on the hype circuit a few years back). Actually, I saw No Age at the Bottleneck in 2008, and it was the same goddamn set up. Hell, even Japandroids guitarist David King's hair looks like No Age guitarist Randy Randall's. It was a weird flashback; the only difference was that Japandroids are more melodic, less experimental, and have a slightly larger jones for Husker Du. That, and their live show wasn't nearly as intense or fun. Otherwise, it was the same fucking band.
That may sound like a sweeping statement, but it's true. Japandroids are No Age's little Canadian brother. They're riding the tail end of a tidal wave of hype that hit its watermark a couple years back, and it's now washing up onto the shore like a dead shark.
Since Japandroids don't have a bassist, the treble on the massive guitar amp cabs is turned way down and the bass, naturally, is turned way up. This fools the audience into thinking that there is a low end. To augment this effect, the kick drum is also turned up loud and there are a lot more cymbal crashes to show that there is a drummer playing a prominent role in a noise rock band. Oh, and it's "Noise Rock," capital N, capital R, which, in this case, means that everything sounds like a muddy wash of distortion and vocals that have been reverbed to the point where even the melody has a hard time cutting through the fuzz.
Granted, Japandroids have a tendency for math rock and more of a penchant for late '90s emo than other guitar and drummer bands, but this is the kind of stuff you have to listen really carefully for, and the subtleties tend to get lost 99% of the time. Instead, it's just a bunch of drums and distortion with King letting go of his guitar to grab the mic and bend his body to the point of looking like Ronnie James Dio. (Although that might have just been because the fan on the floor designed to cool off the audience was blowing King's hair like an arena rock god...or Steve Perry with a curly hipster hair-do.)
I'm sure all of this makes it sound like Japandroids are a shitty band, and really, they're not. They're enthusiastic, and on songs like "Wet Hair," which addresses the French kissing of French girls, they display their knack for sing-a-long choruses and their penchant for anthems. It's fun, it's loud, it's noisy and if drunk, it might be the perfect soundtrack to a Saturday night, but every hype-band on the planet is doing this exact same thing right now. (OK, that's not true. Half the buzz-bands on the planet are doing this right now, the other half are playing with synthesizers.) Bands like Japandroids, though, are bands that are popular only via comparison. If I were working for a Clear Channel radio station, I might say, "If you like No Age, Japandroids are your new favorite band," because, in our disposable culture, that would probably be their selling point. But even if that never happens, they're still going to be a band that no one can describe without mentioning either No Age, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, or Death From Above 1979, which was only made more true by some dude yelling "DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979" in the middle of the show. It's like everyone knows it, and it's not Japandroids' fault. With any luck, tunes like "Young Hearts Spark Fire" will show up on blogs down the line devoted to obscure indie-rock songs of the '00s: songs by bands who put out decent albums but were largely forgotten because, well, they sounded like everyone else.
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