You ever see a group of strangers in a bar so overcome with emotion—maybe the Bills won or they got the dream job; maybe the Bills lost or they just got laid off—that they start to spontaneously sing together, their off-key howls somehow finding a kind of universal tune? Everything is a shout chorus. They sing because they’ve been crushed by a first love but they’re ready to give up all this—the beers, the boys, the game—to experience the rush of young romance again. Sometimes they’re singing “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers; sometimes it’s “American Girl” by Tom Petty. If they’re really drunk or it’s St. Patrick’s Day (or both), they’re singing “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy. Man, that must feel so good.
Japandroids are a band premised on these nights: dreaming about them, living them to the fullest, reminiscing about them fondly afterwards. In their full-throated commitment to debauchery and brotherhood, they counterintuitively avoided the pitfalls of toxic masculinity, celebrating the ecstatic possibilities of hanging out instead of lamenting its contemporary limitations. Despite what Tony Soprano said, Japandroids made “remember when” sound like the highest form of conversation, a lost art of keeping the fire burning. But nostalgia as fuel is always a risky proposition: Once it’s burned dry, it’s hard to keep the lights on. Fate & Alcohol, announced as Japandroids’ final album, strives to rekindle the same spirit that made their first three records sound like the best version of a night of drunken revelry. But with too few innovations and too many well-worn tropes, it lands like those two lonely guys at the bar trying to keep the party going after closing time.
In the seven years since 2017’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life, at least one of the boys (vocalist and guitarist Brian King) finally left town (Vancouver, BC), to become a man: married, one year sober, living in Michigan, with a baby on the way. This has, unsurprisingly, posed a series of existential threats for the band: How can they reproduce the lightning-in-a-bottle enthusiasm they created when King recorded in the same room as drummer and backing vocalist David Prowse? How can they sing about “bikini island” and wanting to “French kiss some French girls” when they have wives back at home? How can they keep lamenting about how “nothing changes,” when more accurately, nothing has been the same for them in over a decade? They had already begun to wrestle with these thoughts on their prior album, replacing their local watering hole with lyrics about every party city across the USA.
If that album was a bit sluggish, they seem to have overcorrected on Fate & Alcohol, simplifying their girls-and-beers formula to its most basic and hoping that power chords and a few overeager “whoa-ohs” can fill the gaps. “Positively 34th Street” does a disservice to its Bob Dylan forebear with the thinnest outline of the dive bar version of a manic pixie dream girl: “A walkin’, talkin’, drinkin’, smokin’, gamblin’ kinda girl,” King sings in a pained register that sounds somewhere between Mac McCaughan with his nose plugged and Ned Flanders covering Morgan Wallen. Across the album, women suffer the worst lyrical fate, becoming mannequins for empty signifiers like a “sequin dress, Chanel No. 5” on “Alice.” At their best, Japandroids appeal just as much to women as to the dudes they’ve been so commonly marketed to—believe it or not, we are just as often searching for oblivion at the bottom of a Miller High Life—but here, they’re rendered as lazy stereotypes: the vixen, the girl next door, the wisecracking “ma’am” doling out advice on “Chicago.”
The strongest songs replace these wincingly obvious descriptors with vaguer gestures at infatuation and heartbreak: “Forgive me if I’m suspicious, but it’s rarely a social call,” Prowse sings on “A Gaslight Anthem,” warily addressing an old flame. Even through his weary bitterness there’s a hint of excitement, backed by guitars that seem to stretch out upon some endless reverberating highway, that recalls the unabashed exuberance of early Japandroids. “Fugitive Summer,” which has the familiar into-the-red distortion that made the band sound at once compressed and infinite, is the closest the album gets to the transcendent rafter-swinging energy of Celebration Rock—if you close your eyes when King sings about sipping a mickey of liquor “slow-leh,” it almost feels like 2012 again.
These small successes only make the rest of the album—from the bad pun of “Eye Contact High” to the predictable refrain of “D&T” (it will make you wish it stood for “death and taxes,” but no, it’s unfortunately “drinking and thinking”)—feel egregiously phoned in. Even the “whoa-ohs” feel canned, as if generated from a Japandroids soundboard. In recent interviews the band has admitted to writing albums merely as cover to go on tour; with no tour slated for this final album, it almost seems like an exercise in futility. On Fate & Alcohol, Japandroids deliver the conviction that made their early records so great, but cannot overcome the palpable mismatch between their current lives and the characters their newest songs portray. Barroom anthems that once felt inspired because they sounded so lived in, so viscerally first-person, come across here like a bad impression of what a single twentysomething might want to hear. There is a fundamentally happy ending to Japandroids—one where they leave the bar and find the kind of love about which they’d once yelled to the heavens. If only their final album reflected just how far they’ve come.
