War on Drugs

Working the soundboard with mad rock scientist Adam Granduciel.

by Patrick Rapa

Neal Santos

Adam Granduciel's giving his new theremin a test run in his living room studio in Fishtown. He flutters his fingers in the air around the antenna; liquidy squeals burst from an amp in the next room. Then he hooks up a guitar and an effects pedal, and strums a few chords. The sound bends when he leans in with the guitar neck, and straightens out when he backs away. "Pretty cool," he says.

He and the rest of The War on Drugs just got back from a session at Moog Studios in Asheville, N.C. The Etherwave-model theremin was a parting gift. While you probably won't hear it shrieking in the background of a War on Drugs album anytime, it does fit Granduciel's mad scientist/tinkerer vibe.

And this is his lab, a small, sunlit room cluttered with all kinds of well-worn toys: a 16-track tape machine, a couple tape echo devices, a harmonizer, some old tube preamps, half-busted '80s reverb units, organs, synths, guitars, a Tom Thumb piano— "It's pretty minimal actually. It's pretty stripped down," Granduciel says, straight-faced. He's thinking of the high-tech recording setups the Drugs or his other band, Kurt Vile & the Violators, have found themselves in recently. "But it's nice to have a little work space, you know?"

This is where both bands practice, and where Granduciel shapes and reshapes his music. Stuck to the walls are thick strips of tape pulled off the soundboard — marked-up, scribbled-on relics from bygone recording sessions. There's also a wrinkled poster of Tom Petty. The War on Drugs recently did some recording at Echo Mountain, another studio in Asheville, and found out halfway through that they were using the same soundboard Petty used for his 1979 classic Damn the Torpedoes. "Blew my mind," says Granduciel. "He's definitely one of my favorites in terms of songcraft."

Granduciel leans over his computer until he finds the track he's looking for, one of the songs from those sessions. Perhaps it's the power of suggestion, but it seems like there's a little bit of "Refugee" in this one. More prevalent is the half-lush/half-raw folk-rock sound, typical of The War on Drugs. The frontman's keyboards and guitars can set a moody scene, but Mike Zanghi's drums and Dave Hartley's bass inject a resilient, classic rock edge. The vocals echo — sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes with a sung-in-a-subway-tunnel sheen — and the guitar strums along. Brings to mind open roads and hot breezes.

Neal Santos THE WAR ROOM: "It's pretty minimal actually. It's pretty stripped down," Granduciel says of his living room studio setup. "But it's nice to have a little work space, you know?"

Flipping through his iTunes, Granduciel points out hours upon hours of recordings that became the band's due-in-October EP, Future Weather (Secretly Canadian). The final version clocks in at a mere 28 minutes. This is the raw first take, here's the one with the clean guitar lick, a version with looped drums. A single song might have 50 or more remixes. Somehow he keeps track of it all, able to assemble an evolutionary path for each one on a whim.

Already he's thinking about re-recording a couple tracks from the EP for a full-length due out in March. He doesn't want fans to feel cheated, but he's got this urge to push the songs in new directions inspired by the Asheville trip. The early Drugs recordings were essentially homemade solo projects; now that it's a full band, Granduciel's compulsion for exploring sonic possibilities seems to be increasing. He loves the feeling of the band getting locked in, everybody on the same page. "Drugs is the kind of band where like you try to keep it real loose so you don't overthink everything," he says. "Then by the third or fourth show of the tour, you feel like the best band in the world."

(pat@citypaper.net)