Japandroids

In Spring 2009, a dumbly named Vancouver band released a track called “Young Hearts Spark Fire.” Duke University and I were not on friendly terms during this particular season and the song was perfectly attuned to my golden youth in Southern California, where everything was bear hugs and wrestling in the sand. Japandroids, with their inarticulate lyrics, double-digit word counts and call-and-response vocals, hit the nail on the head of something precious and urgent. It was genuine “lust for life” territory.

The next fall, the band came to Local 506, rolled out a frickin’ wind machine and played until their eyes melted and the 40 dudes in attendance were sweaty and high-fiving. The year after, they released “Younger Us” (included on this album) and played Hopscotch to a few hundred people, girls included this time, and challenged Titus Andronicus’ reign as mosh pit kings.

Celebration Rock, LP number two, outdoes its predecessor by a long shot. Japandroids benefit largely from a sharpened perspective and writing chops that break through the hazy evocations. The snippets of punk rock memento, always good for sing along, are now also worth writing on paper: “Remember we had them all on the run/ And the night we saw the midnight sun”, “Remember that night you were already in bed/ said “f**k it” got up and drank with me instead.” A band that once declared “I Quit Girls” has mustered up a more bittersweet, ambivalent encouragement for past lovers: “When they love you, and they will/ Tell them all they love in my shadow/ And when they try to bring you down/ Tell them all to go to hell.” And of course, there are lines plagiarized from my own drunk texts: “If I had all of the answers and you had the body we wanted/ Would we love with a legendary fire?” This is seriously emo stuff, but it’s rock music after all, and you can’t sing along to Jack Kerouac.

This 35-minute album could be exhausting and annoying, a rosy-eyed and reckless slice of preemptive nostalgia. But these “wines and roses of our souls,” yells to the heavens, “drinking to restless nights and restless fears”– they aren’t naïve anecdotes, but challenges. It’s no accident the final track is named “Continuous Thunder.”

Between Post-Nothing and Celebration Rock, Duke University and I fell in love. Then something traumatic happened: I graduated. I’ll soon wear a suit and close-toed shoes five days a week. I’ll commute and get drug tested. But I won’t forget the way it made me feel.