For Vancouver, British Columbia’s garage rock two-piece Japandroids, there is really only one refrain, and that is to do it: whatever it is, do it with heart and do it now.
Their album Post-Nothing is filled with constant homage to the moment’s seizure. On their stellar track “Young Hearts Spark Fire,” a song that is nothing short of unforgettable as an anthem for angst, the following lines burst forth repeatedly:
I don’t want to worry about dying
I just want to worry about sunshine and girls
They’re words that are hard to ignore as plaintive and presciently as they come belting over the top of sizzling guitars and aggressive percussion. Other bands shout to the oblivion, but Japandroids shout at it as if it owed them something. Much of the eight-track album follows in the tracks of “Young Hearts Spark Fire” in its blunt single-mindedness. Brian King and David Prowse are on their third record (2007’s All Lies and Lullaby Death Jams preceded), and this one may be the breakthrough. “The Boys Are Leaving Town” and “Wet Hair” are helio-centric summer pop-punk, the latter begging precociously for the time to French kiss some French girls, a sentiment that is as desperate and romantic as it sounds; more fractured and grinding is “Heart Sweats,” a song that possesses jagged, staggered drums. Post-Nothing is emboldened with more than enough heart, but perhaps nothing so heartfelt as “I Quit Girls,” which closes the album down into a gradual fade, back into the proverbial oblivion, perhaps completing the loop. Arriving at the indie rock context for Japandroids is almost as fun as describing their music. Their penchant for nuanced punk songwriting aligns them with Public Image Ltd.; the anger, the noise, however, brings back images of the Nation of Ulysses and their DC Dischord constituents.
Their clip of one album a year for the last three years offers hope that the evolution from the rainy western Canadian province is only in its infancy. Hope might be that they never settle down, their unsettling angst being so crucial to the formula. Maybe they don’t need it:
You can keep tomorrow
After tonight we’re not gonna need it
Clearly one of the year’s best, most worthy listens of this or any year.
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