The War on Drugs’ 2011 album Slave Ambient saw perpetual unease as a Zen state: bandleader Adam Granduciel’s ruminations on restlessness read like a veritable prescription for Xanax, but the psychedelia-smeared country-rock enveloping his words was all, like, “No worries, dude.” The War on Drugs’ third album, however, presents no easy remedy for his inner turmoil. If the mesmerizing motorik hum of Slave Ambient gave Granduciel an outlet to escape his problems, Lost in the Dream is where he pulls a U to survey the emotional wreckage. While his former War on Drugs compadre Kurt Vile is forever Waking on a Pretty Daze, Granduciel has been sleepless through some ugly nights.
As detailed in a recent Grantland feature, Lost In the Dream was the product of a grueling, year-long recording process. Though Granduciel involved his touring band more so than any previous War on Drugs record, his perfectionist tendencies still held sway, resulting in endless cycles of recording, revising, and scrapping. And such self-doubt wasn’t helped by the fact that Granduciel was recovering from the flame-out of a long-term relationship, the ashes of which are scattered all over his lyric sheet here. But the obsessiveness and insecurity pay off massively on Lost in the Dream—this is the War on Drugs’ most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date. In essence, the War on Drugs have evolved as a band on an album-to-album basis in precisely the same fashion as so many of their songs: what at first seemed like a fairly straightforward, traditionalist roots-rock exercise has very gradually, very subtly blossomed into something wondrous and profound.
Lost in the Dream continues down the Slave Ambient route of bridging polar-opposite strains of 1980s rock—namely, the tremulous haze of late-era Spacemen 3 and the sort of flyover-state Americana anthems used to sell pick-up trucks. But even in the album’s opening seconds, the new album asserts itself as a more urgent affair—overtop the blurry, break-of-dawn guitar ripples of “Under the Pressure”, a stuttering drum machine sounds off like an alarm clock coaxing you out of bed and prodding you out the door. And if the steady-pulsed melody that emerges initially positions “Under the Pressure” as the most placid song about anxiety ever, by the third chorus run—at which point it’s amassed a swirl of dueling guitar solos, starburst synths, and brown-note saxophone swells—you feel the full weight of this nine-minute track bearing down on your chest.
This tension is inescapable. Whether it’s the hair-raising, Autobahn-blazing charge of “An Ocean In Between the Waves” or the Positively South Street sway of “Eyes of the Wind”, Granduciel’s litany of worries are laid bare here, free of any textural interference or obfuscation. And the comparatively direct lyrics mirror the new approach to incorporating some of Granduciel’s more unfashionable influences. As ever, totemic figures like Dylan and Springsteen cast a long shadow over the War on Drugs’ terrain, but Granduciel is the sort of classic-rock purist who wore out the grooves of those artists’ most canonical albums so long ago that he now finds fresher inspiration in their less lauded 80s discography.
Period sounds abound: “Red Eyes” is what would happen if Springteen’s simmering “I’m on Fire” was actually set aflame; “Burning” finds its fuse in the buoyant keyboard riff to Rod Stewart’s 1981 new-wave novelty “Young Turks”; the melancholic mid-album meditation “Disappearing” sounds like the synth-powered rhythm track of Tears for Fears’ “Pale Shelter” on a codeine drip. And the preponderance of glistening piano chords on this record suggests Granduciel is not one to touch his dial whenever Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” pops up on his local oldies station.
But if Lost in the Dream is unapologetic in its dad-rock reverence, it’s dad-rock for people who are too fucked up and broken to even think of having kids. (As he sings on “The Ocean In Between the Waves”: “I’m in my finest hour/ Can I be more than just a fool?”) In sharp contrast to, say, recent efforts to liberate Dylan’s 80s output from its dated production, Granduciel’s songs are left to fidget and squirm within the claustrophobic sonic confines and synthetic sheen. In his hands, these echoes of the past ultimately emphasize the uncertainty of his future, those shiny surfaces representing the good life that seems forever out of reach.
And besides, on Lost in the Dream, the most crucial details are found in its structural mutations. The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating. Note the shift that occurs two minutes and 50 seconds into “Suffering”, where the pent-up despondency heard in Granduciel’s state-of-his-union address (“Why we here when we’re both gonna fake it?”) is unleashed in a crying jag of drizzling piano chords and gently weeping White Album-like guitar slides. Or in the midst of the album’s epic break-up-ballad finale, “In Reverse”, you realize that all of the angst and ache that went into the song, and the album’s creation as a whole, is just building to the moment of release provided by the big, shoulder rub of an acoustic-guitar riff that appears out of nowhere at the 5:13 mark. They’re the sort of perfect little touches that effectively translate Granduciel’s private hurt into communal catharsis—and reify Lost in the Dream as an immaculately assembled portrait of a man falling apart.
