Not since DFA 1979 bludgeoned their way through, dripping in testosterone and fuelled by damaged male pride, have we really had a band prepared to ditch the acoustic guitars and piano, and play it straight. There might not be anything much sadder than a broken heart, and much like the Canadian duo before them, Japandroids are channelling the primal through a no bullshit/bed-shaped filter. Sure, it pays to quietly lament (sometimes) but they aren’t prepared to hide behind misty-eyed, insipid isolation. It’s not going to have us hybridising genres and coining new genres because it’s simply an album barracked along by power and drama. Although the now defunct DFA 1979 broached break ups and intercourse with all the delicacy of Bigfoot doing ballet, Japandroids don’t exactly tip toe around the subject either. In fact most of the songs are about girls with healthy helpings of relationships, goodbyes and escapism in there for good measure – so there’s really nothing new. No, the appeal lies in their invigorating sense of freedom and release that reverberates throughout ‘Post-Nothing’s unabashed 36 minutes.
It’s an album of getting away; recklessly setting out on road trips, growing out of your home town after renegade days spent shoplifting porn magazines and pic n mix; it’s music that takes you back to your wonder years and wistfully considers what made them so naïve, carefree and idyllic. Brian King banks down on chords filtered through plaid shirts and quarts of Bud, growling and biting on every lyric, spitting heavy shards, as sticksman David Prowse keeps the percussion rough and ready. Pitching in at little over half an hour, the pace, as you’d expect is relentless, and hurtled out at a breathless velocity, ‘Crazy Forever’ lulls slightly, lurching into heavy Dead Meadow/Black Mountain riffage but it’s when ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ careers into life carrying the line “We used to dream/Now we worry about dying” that their simple outlook is conveyed and accelerated until the guitar crunch and wailing feedback of ‘I Quit Girls’ concertedly closes the album with high-flying bluster.
And yet, there’s an inescapable sense of melancholy, because for all the energy and liberation, it’s a stark reminder that the era where you didn’t “worry about dying/I just wanna worry about sunshine girls” pretty much disappeared as soon as you crawled out from underneath the 16-24 duvet and bills stopped becoming junk mail. Gnawing despondence aside, Post Nothing is an album to cannonball you out of any malaise purely because Japandroids don’t hold anything back.