No. 53 - Younger Us edition
As Japandroids take their final bow, a look back at their masterpiece, Celebration Rock
Japandroids are calling it quits.
The Vancouver duo’s fourth album, Fate & Alcohol out this Friday, will be the band’s last. I reviewed it for Exclaim! — it’s pretty great — calling it “a fitting end to one of Canada's most inspiring and singular bands from the past 15 years.”
Notorious road dogs, they won’t be touring the record, making their show at Toronto’s Phoenix Theatre all the way back in 2018 their last (sadly, I was not there).
The reasons are myriad, and you can read about them in a great story over at Stereogum.
Outside of that, the band are apparently not doing interviews to support the record. I’ve spoken with singer-guitarist Brian King twice in the past, most recently for their last album, Near to the Wild Heart of Life and around the time they released Celebration Rock, their penultimate DIY masterpiece, for Spinner, AOL’s now-defunct music vertical. As fate would have it I recently found a bunch of old interviews and features I wrote on an old hard drive, including that story.
Given their band’s impending end, I thought now was as good a time as ever to unearth that piece, which you can read below. Coincidentally, I was somewhere in the crowd at Lee’s Palace when they shot the live footage included in the video for “The House that Heaven Built.” If anyone spots me let me know!
Fans of Vancouver duo Japandroids have a lot to celebrate with the band’s latest, Celebration Rock finally available. But the record almost didn’t happen. The duo’s debut, Post Nothing was supposed to be the period, rather than a comma in their career.
“By the end of 2008 we had stopped practicing, stopped working on songs, stopped booking shows, pretty much stopped everything but trying to get the record pressed,” recalls the band’s singer-guitarist, Brian King. “And even then we weren’t going to play any songs to support it.”
That all changed after the album was embraced by critics and fans, forcing the band to scrap breakup plans and hit the road. “Touring was the last thing we really wanted to do and didn’t,” says King. “We said, ‘Let’s see if we can turn this into one tour.’ And of course, one tour turned into two, turned into three turned into going to Europe -18 months of straight touring.”
Yet while playing all those shows, the subject of a follow-up was never discussed. It wasn’t until the end of 2010, King along with drummer David Prowse, realized they’d maxed out on touring Post Nothing and would need to come up with new material if they wanted to stay on the road. “It wasn’t til that time that we said, ‘Well are we going to call it like we always planned to or do we like touring and playing shows enough that its worth trying to do another record to see if we can keep touring.’ So that’s what we decided to do.”
All that touring changed the band’s approach to writing says King. “When you’re just a local band making music, the mindset of writing and performing songs is different then when you’re a touring band that’s well known enough to have an audience.” The eclectic styles of Post Nothing’s eight tracks created what he describes as “peaks and valleys in their sets. “‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ for example, that five minutes of the set was always just a peak,” he says. “The energy in the room, the sing-along factor, the physicality of the audience during that song was something we took notice of.” So the band decided to try and write an album, where the whole show is a peak.”
They spent the first half of 2011 writing new songs, but having exhausted their inventory of unreleased material with a trio of seven-inches the previous year, the pair soon found themselves at a creative impasse. “We’re not particularly artistic or creative people and we’re certainly not songwriters, so writing songs is a challenge for us,” says King. “Coming off the road after two years, it’s anticlimactic. It’s really easy to come home to Vancouver and feel like it’s over. We were back to the same routine in our old lives like it never happened. It was easy to get stuck.”
To shake things up, the pair packed up their gear and headed south to Nashville, TN where they’d rented a house. Grabbing a bunch of cheap soundproofing materials from the local Home Depot, they spent the next six weeks writing, playing and exploring the city. “We didn’t know anyone and we could just discover the city ourselves.” Both barnstorming lead single “The House that Heaven Built,” and album closer “Continuous Thunder” came out of the sessions. “We drove home from Nashville and the day after went right into the studio and recorded those songs.”
Although bigger studios, sounds and producers were options, King and Prowse opted to stick with long-time producer Jesse Gander at the Hive in Vancouver. “We recorded at the same studio, with the same engineer, with the same gear using the same methodology.” The only difference says King was that both band members had gotten better at their instruments and playing together. “We had the luxury of being able to stick to the same thing we’ve always done while still feeling like a step forward.”
Fate & Alcohol is out this Friday, October 18 on Arts & Crafts.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms, and submissions.