Future Weather

EPOct 26 / 20108 songs, 28m 9s
Indie Rock
Noteable

Imagine a *Basement Tapes*-style jam involving Bob Dylan and Sonic Youth and you’ll have a sense of what *Future Weather* feels like. On this provocative EP, the War On Drugs dives deeply into murky zones both musical and emotional, oscillating between shoegazer haziness and garage-rock cacophony (sometimes in the same song). Singer/songwriter Adam Garnduciel — picking up the slack after the departure of bandmate Kurt Vile — dishes out jump-cut imagery with a teasing, slightly rueful air. “Brothers” and “A Pile of Tires” nervously skirt the outer edges of folk-rock, unreeling shadowy narratives built around skeletal guitars and lean drum lines. “Comin’ Through” and especially “Baby Missiles” are more produced affairs, layering quivery keyboards upon rhythm tracks to create a billowing atmosphere of free-floating angst. The War On Drugs get most experimental in “The History of Plastic,” an ambient sound collage drizzled with analog synthesizer daubs. Even at their most abstract, the band still retains a sense of their expansive Western-themed vision.

The War On Drugs is once again at the blurred edges of American music: overexposing studio limitations, piling tape upon tape to maximum density, and then — with each song — they pull off the scaffolding to reveal what sticks, keeping only what's absolutely necessary and dig into what sounds like the best kind of fucked up. As on their debut 'Wagonwheel Blues', they take small moments occurring over multiple tapes and multiple song versions, and put every last drop of trust in their own instinct of momentum.  'Future Weather' is a provocative — sometimes playful, sometimes weighty — glimpse into The War On Drugs' song-sculpting process, a process that remains a big mystery even to those on the inside. While some bands are content to merely pace the abyss, The War On Drugs coast through it.  And along the way, 'Future Weather' sidesteps most every connotation associated with the EP format. There's a true coalescence and symmetry here, one of wash and drone, of momentum and tone, but also of theme. Friendship, loyalty and keeping a group of spiritual brothers together are all themes that songwriter Adam Granduciel focuses in on for 'Future Weather'. "Wondering where my friends are going / Wondering why they didn't take me / Looking out the window of my room / Looking out where something once ran wild," he sings on "Brothers" with a sense of soured peace, leaving out all the right things, leaving room in there for the shared experiences of your own friends. There are cues taken from our best American songwriters, yet The War On Drugs are wise enough to also implode or send themselves into outer space when the moment calls for it. The driving organ riff that pushes "Baby Missiles" may be inspired by a fever dream of Springsteen or Dire Straits more than any particular jam. And the endless layers of guitar melody and atmospherics of "Comin' Through," rather than add weight to the vessel, only work to fill its sails with warmer and warmer winds.

7.6 / 10

Philly throwback rock band that birthed Kurt Vile releases an EP that displays new compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture.

C

On the Future Weather EP, promising Philadelphia band The War On Drugs comes on like a jumpy roots-rock outfit that never felt it necessary to dig past its collection of beat-up, mid-’80s Hooters and Tom Petty tapes. Future Weather doesn’t have a prairie pretense; you can practically feel singer-songwriter Adam…

79 %

The quick low-down on The War On Drugs is they are a collection of folk rockers who have gradually been rising out of the Philly scene over the past five years. They made some traction a couple years back when Secretly Canadian picked them up and released the bands debut LP. Shortly there after official