Granduciel doesn’t create fully-drawn characters (other people are phantoms or wishes or memories in his lyrics) but there’s always a desire for connection, and he lets in just enough light to make it seem possible. The intricate production and subject matter lend a feeling of hermeticism the album is a place you hide inside, not a tool for exploring the world. Beneath the lush surface, songs focus on loneliness, alienation, private suffering, and the rare moments when you can leave that all behind. He plays roughly half the instruments on the album, in addition to producing and engineering it. It’s very much the product of Granduciel’s obsessive vision. But A Deeper Understanding isn’t a “band” record in the same way. Springsteen had his E Street Band, Petty had his Heartbreakers, and Young had Crazy Horse. The approach to rhythm highlights the glide of the arrangement, creating a long rope of sound bound together so tightly it could never be pulled apart. The arrangement of “In Chains” hums and explodes but the drums plow ahead with barely a fill or an accent, precisely marking the passing time. Instead, he favors a steady, muted pulse evocative of krautrock’s motorik groove. So yes, Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Petty, and Neil Young all made songs between 19 that sounded something like the War on Drugs, but they often had these booming gated drums, a technique Granduciel mostly avoids. Vogel’s opulent edit of Springsteen’s “ Tougher Than the Rest.” There’s a thread of Granduciel’s music that extends from something like Talk Talk’s ” I Don’t Believe in You“ from their 1986 album The Colour of Spring and winds through later incarnations of sun-kissed guitar pop, or even producer M.
Like the music from that era, A Deeper Understanding is all about contrast, the push and pull of rock grittiness and authenticity, while the layers of keyboards and studio sheen give the music a dreamier quality, suggesting the kind of imaginary spaces dreamed up by future-obsessed ravers.
Over his last two records, Granduciel has chosen a very particular slice of music history-mid-’80s rock made by baby boomers with synthesizers-repossessed it, and built a new world within it. The arrangements throughout are mind-boggling, and if Granduciel leans slightly away from the explosive anthems punctuated by an echoing “Whooo!” that made Lost in the Dream so special, the extra attention to craft makes up for it.Ī Deeper Understanding is also a fascinating study in influence it’s hard to think of a band with more obvious touchstones that also sounds so original. “Holding On” is packed with piano and celeste and a chugging acoustic, but the entire song is wrapped around the heavenly slide guitar from Anthony LaMarca and Meg Duffy, which uncurls like a plume of smoke and steals the song like a Robert Fripp solo. On A Deeper Understanding, his first album for Atlantic, the synths get an extra twinkle, the bass-led builds get another octave of rumble, and some songs have a dozen instruments on them where they once might have had seven or eight. True to the project’s nature, the War on Drugs’ albums aren’t reinventions, they’re more like a new model in an established line-a Mark IV that adds a few features and continually refines the engineering. His way of understanding the world is to use that sound machine to excavate and explore his interior life and hopefully shape it into something listeners might understand, even when he’s not entirely sure where he’s going. Granduciel’s work finds its meaning in the totality of its sound, in how writing and arranging and perfecting every detail in the studio is part of building music that carries you with it. If so many of Springsteen’s songs were about machines, War on Drugs’ music is a machine. The singer and songwriter Adam Granduciel, who leads the War on Drugs and who is often compared to Springsteen, arrives at similar terrain from another angle.
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