The War On Drugs ‘Slave Ambient’ Review: Looking Back 10 Years Later – Stereogum

It was a dense, lush sound, one in which you could always find new details but also one where the songs crystallized enough to pull you in right away. For me, the first time I heard Slave Ambient was one of the most random places possible. I had been studying abroad in Shanghai for a few months, and my brother who had just seen the War On Drugs open for the National in New York sent me a few YouTube links to check out. Thanks to a VPN we had installed to bypass Chinese firewalls, it was damn near impossible to load YouTubes, but when I finally heard these songs, I was floored. Maybe a month later, I tracked down a CD copy of Slave Ambient in Sydney, and probably paid something like 25 American dollars for it. (I was a stubbornly late abandoner of physical media.) For almost a week, I walked every inch of Sydney listening to this album, staring at Christmas decorations in the summer and oceans that were such an alien shade of blue they almost seemed psychedelic themselves. I was immersed in this sound, somehow a perfect soundtrack for ambling around a place as foreign and far-flung to me as Australia. But all along the way, Slave Ambient was really beckoning me back home.

For a young classic rocker, the War On Drugs were already easy to love. But for me, having grown up in small-town Pennsyvlania about 90 minutes north of Granduciels home in Philly, their sound felt like mine. In their music, I heard every train graveyard, every dead shopping mall, every collapsing coal breaker, every formerly opulent stone building left to decay in towns long since left behind. Many of Granduciels lyrics on Slave Ambient are little folk echoes, almost placeholders rollin and driftin, looking out past the rubble. Hes been up in the highlands, past the farms and debris. And in all that wreckage, he found something still living, enough that he could breathe a whole different array of colors into it. Driving around Pennsylvania listening to Slave Ambient, the fact that Granduciel could move through those same surroundings and find something new to be pulled up from the ground was more than enough to make you a fan it was inspiring.

It felt like I knew the sound of Slave Ambient somewhere deep down, but at the same time Granduciel articulated it in a way I couldve never imagined myself. Each time a grainy acoustic guitar ran up against a mutating loop, or his earthen voice sang above celestial synths, you could see the past and present and whatever came next mingling freely, a vibrant dream cohering where they all met.

Of course, thats long since become the calling card for the War On Drugs. Throughout, they have been described as classicist musicians tweaking not-exactly-enamored corners of rock history. When Slave Ambients successor Lost In The Dream arrived in 2014, Granduciel built on where hed been before but also crafted a whole new sound. More washed-out and bleary, at times more organic, but still existing in a Technicolor mist only he could see. And if people had tripped over themselves catching all the Springsteen and Dylan DNA on Slave Ambient, the next iteration of the Drugs really sent them reeling. Don Henley? Dire Straits? That whole stretch of years where Boomer musicians tried to keep up with the times, writing dusty rockers dappled with synthesizers? Really?

It was one of the least excavated parts of music history even in a time addled with nostalgic cycles and recurring resurrections. That has remained the path Granduciel has walked since, but at the same time there was always an undercurrent that felt, even as the band garnered runaway acclaim, uncharitable in drawing those comparison points. Granduciel was never exhuming corpses in another revival. From Lost In The Dream onwards, he took the Drugs into a space both watercolor and chiaroscuro, manipulating history to his own liking more than ever before.

And, bizarrely, it brought him greater and greater success. From the very first time we all heard the Woo! in Red Eyes, we knew we were in for something different musically on Lost In The Dream. What was impossible to predict, even then, was the implausible skyrocketing rise of this band matter-of-fact Philly guys playing in a working-class rock tradition turned cosmic, steadily climbing up festival posters until they were Grammy winners and one of the only big new rock bands in an era when big new rock bands are not often a thing. In the wake of Lost In The Dreams true breakthrough, Granduciel signed a two-record deal with Atlantic. The second of those, I Dont Live Here Anymore, comes out in October and if the absolute bangers Granduciel previewed on Instagram last year are anything to go by, it may take the War On Drugs ever further into the stratosphere.

For years, I used to hang on Slave Ambient, this gorgeous and transfixing document of when I first found this new strange sound from this scrappy Philadelphia band. I used to hold it up alongside the much more towering records that followed. But now, revisiting it on the other side of all that, you do have to yield a bit, admit that as wholly unique as Slave Ambient was in its time, it now doesnt quite compare to the peaks Granduciel has scaled since. Its more elusive, more straight-up druggy, without the precise yet blurred balance Granduciel has struck between sharp songcraft and madman sonic wizardry on the subsequent two albums. All these years later, it almost feels more appropriate to group Slave Ambient alongside Wagonwheel Blues as the prologue, the build-up to the War On Drugs becoming what they were supposed to be. Its still a rich, entrancing prologue, but a prologue all the same. Eventually, out past the rubble and up from the waves of ambience, a Woo! would ring out, and there would be no looking back.

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The War On Drugs 'Slave Ambient' Review: Looking Back 10 Years Later - Stereogum