Review Summary: Graceful surrender.
Let the elephant vacate the room now.
Fate & Alcohol is neither Japandroids’ reunion album nor their breakup record, but it arrives six years to the week since their final gig and with an endless carousel of lost baggage to sift through. For all intents and purposes, the band formally ends here and had informally ceased to function long ago. The ten tracks comprising this album were written between 2017 and 2020, initially conceived with the stage in mind only to largely end up shelved as frontman Brian King sobered up and found he didn’t particularly miss the rigmarole of touring or the risks that accompany it. “It’s not like we got into a huge fight...and now we’re broken up,” Japandroids’ other half, David Prowse, illuminates in a lengthy (well worth your time) interview with Stereogum; “but I’d rather be playing drums and going all over the world playing shows, to be completely honest.”
And that’s that. No uproar, no bad blood, just a simple, human impasse. It seemed unthinkable once. Consider the Japandroids of lore, a frat party soundtrack for ostensibly hip crowds too drunk off booze and/or bravado to let self-consciousness tread on their heels.
Post-Nothing and
Celebration Rock, the duo’s first two records, stripped spitfire rock and roll to its primal essentials: distortion, driving rhythm, and exultant shouting. Pick a track from either release and there’s a 50/50 chance its most powerful statement was simply some permutation of “woah.” Forget complexity or nuance—energy was Japandroids’ defining essence, and relying on energy alone is no sustainable endeavor. By 2017’s
Near to the Wild Heart of Life, King and Prowse seemed perilously close to conflating their own wellbeing with the ethos they’d forged together. Hooks? Oh, that album still packed hooks! Their central vision was getting blurry, though: in their prime, Japandroids were a conduit for the wild ride.
Near promised the same journey then spun in circles like a kiddie amusement park contraption instead of a towering roller coaster.
Think what you will of
Fate & Alcohol, but this much is clear: the Japandroids you once loved is no more. That’s an immutable fact, and one King and Prowse seem to have recognized between this album’s conception and release. Rest assured: the most powerful of power chords remain intact, as does the band’s knack for roof-raising sing-along refrains and Jesse Gander’s raw, deliberately under-polished engineering. To an inattentive ear, their blueprint hasn’t shifted—instead, King’s target demographic has, and that in and of itself elevates
Fate & Alcohol above accusations of continuing the decline hinted at by
Near.
Where that album flashed wrinkles of age in Japandroids’ facade, this one confronts the morning after by design. In its best moments—opener “Eye Contact High” and the Dylan-nodding “Positively 34th Street,” for example—the sweat and passion of their golden years find recycled purpose via less hedonistic narratives. “Alice” and “Chicago” unravel will-they/won’t-they romantic tension with impeccable balance, patiently crescendoing without abandoning concise songcraft. Lest that all sound too Fate and not enough Alcohol, “D&T” recounts a pre-show bender where King realized how close he was to reaching rock bottom, and “Upon Sober Reflection” is aptly as naked and self-critical as the vocalist has ever been. “Fugitive Summer” examines the push and pull of adulthood's delayed gratification. "One Without The Other" compares the warmth of a distant lover against the drink already in hand. Read between the lines and tracks like “All Bets Are Off” even subtextually bear the weight of the album’s legacy; its—and the band’s—final stanza is a plea as much as it is an instructive farewell: “
come closer to me / till you can hear me breathing / and feel my heartbeat.”
So yeah, fuck it. I’ll bite. Even if witty zingers or lyric-less chants come few and far between, their absence is in service of a plain, Springsteen-esque language that finds poignancy in the dopamine-starved rapport between lovers, losers, and chance. Above all else, the fact
Fate & Alcohol even saw the light of day is a blessing in disguise; here more than anywhere else in the Japandroids canon, King (if not necessarily Prowse) demands to be heard on his own terms, no longer chasing adolescence’s event horizon or the apparition of a Younger Them. Seeing them shift the goalposts is bittersweet, sure, but their chance to go out in a blaze of glory came and passed a dozen years ago. All things considered, to appreciate
Fate & Alcohol is to appreciate graceful surrender. This band isn’t theirs to die for anymore. Now let them live.
