The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding album review

The obsessive studio work of Adam Granduciel creates a hermetic experience like no other. A Deeper Understanding is his most layered and meticulous album, a twilight world in which to lose yourself.
In his early songs, Bruce Springsteen wrote about machines. Cars were always there to the point of cliché, but he also wrote about howling factories and creaky amusement park rides and record players and undefined contraptions filled with flame that waited for you ominously on the edge of town. His interest is easy to understand. Machines take you places and inflict things upon you, and machines also rust and break down and remind you that time is passing and death is always near.

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. If so many of Springsteen’s songs were about machines, War on Drugs’ music is a machine. 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. 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.

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. 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. “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. 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.

A 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. 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. 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. 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. Vogel’s opulent edit of Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest.”

So yes, Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Petty, and Neil Young all made songs between 1983 and 1988 that sounded something like the War on Drugs, but they often had these booming gated drums, a technique Granduciel mostly avoids. Instead, he favors a steady, muted pulse evocative of krautrock’s motorik groove. 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. 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.

Springsteen had his E Street Band, Petty had his Heartbreakers, and Young had Crazy Horse. But A Deeper Understanding isn’t a “band” record in the same way. It’s very much the product of Granduciel’s obsessive vision. He plays roughly half the instruments on the album, in addition to producing and engineering it. Beneath the lush surface, songs focus on loneliness, alienation, private suffering, and the rare moments when you can leave that all behind. 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.

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 album’s first single was the epic 11-minute travelogue “Thinking of a Place,” with a glowing synth swell reminiscent of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and a patient tempo that suggests a slow walk through the woods in the dark, the kind where you keep your hands out in front of you, feeling for branches. It turned out to be an appropriate introduction to this record because “thinking of a place”—somewhere where you can lose yourself, get out of your own head, somewhere else—is what the whole record is ultimately about. A different songwriter—someone like Neil Young, say—might sketch out what this place looks like, tell us about who we might find there. But Granduciel can’t, or doesn’t want to. And that lack of articulation, that inability to identify the source of pain and the path to redemption, becomes another of the record’s themes. But all that happens beneath the surface, almost subliminally; it’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.