Vancouver duo Japandroids don’t mess with success on acclaimed second LP

TORONTO – Sometimes, an indie band riding a maelstrom of hype from a rough-hewn debut will get a little carried away on a sophomore record — producers are hired, edges are polished, bloat is tolerated. Not so for Japandroids.

Following break-through noise-pop pounder “Post-Nothing,” the band changed virtually nothing. “Celebration Rock” — in stores now — features the same two people recording in the same Vancouver studio with the same engineer wrapping the same number of songs in the same comfortable coat of fuzz. In a bizarre coincidence, it even has almost the same run-time, differing by only 30 seconds.

And it sure is fitting for a group that has made its name on anthems of arrested adolescence to greet musical maturity with stubborn defiance. But frontman Brian King says the band had simply grown so much in the past three years since releasing their debut, they didn’t need to change anything else.

Most important of all? The man who describes the band’s breakout debut as “sort of an accident” says he finally became confident in what the duo was doing.

“When we were first starting … we literally had no idea what we were doing. Arguably, we still don’t,” King said in a recent telephone interview from Vancouver.

“(But) we were confident that we had gotten so much better at not only writing songs, but also just playing our instruments … and that coupled with the fact that Jesse (Gander) is a light-years-better recording engineer now than he was three years ago, we just knew we didn’t need to change the formula to make a better record.

“It was just inherently going to be better if we just went and did the same thing.”

And, it would seem, they were right.

Early reviews have been every bit as breathless as the last-night-on-earth exigency featured on the album, with taste-making Chicago zine Pitchfork lavishing the “awe-inspiring” record with its rare “best new music” distinction and Rolling Stone calling the disc “one of the year’s most thrilling rock records.”

So yes, it’ll all be familiar to fans of the duo’s superlative debut. Guitars are strummed furiously, King hollers as if he can’t physically contain the words any longer and somehow the band arrives at pop bliss more often than not, particularly on the wistful “Younger Us” and downright belligerent “The House That Heaven Built.”

Everything is urgent, everything is of the utmost importance. Every night seems to linger perilously on the brink between celebration and catastrophe. With Japandroids, there is no in-between, though this set certainly reflects King’s desire to hedge on the side of positivity.

People who like it and don’t like it will probably offer the same feedback — every song sounds the same — and that doesn’t ruffle King.

“It’s very easy for us to recognize that while we might only do one thing well, we do do that one thing pretty well,” King said cheerfully.

“There are just certain songs in the set that garner a reaction from the audience. For us, ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ (is) an obvious one. So the idea was, let’s try to write a whole record that garners that kind of response, so when we play shows on tour — instead of having these peaks on the set, it’s just one continuous peak because you’re just like, assaulting people with that feeling that they love, and they don’t even have a chance to rest.”

When chatting about his music, the convivial King speaks with some of the same choked intensity that fuels him onstage. He’s also uncommonly frank in summing up the band’s strengths and shortcomings — “I don’t even think I’m particularly creative, in music but also independent of music” is one characteristic quote.

But he’s intentionally evasive when asked about their lyrics.

“An important thing that I focused on on this record was not making the songs too introspective,” he said.

“(I wanted) them to be as inclusive as possible. I was trying to put my experiences into the songs, but at the same time, tell a story that anyone who I don’t know from any place can listen to and feel like perhaps that song was written just for them.”

As a result, King avoids getting too specific in explaining his lyrical inspiration. He describes the raging “Adrenaline Nightshift,” for example, as an attempt to cram three years of “insanity life experience” into a few minutes and declines to say much else.

That, of course, sums up much of the lyrical content on the album.

But it would be a mistake to think that the Japandroids’ momentum-mounting past few years have been a “glorious ride each and every day,” as King puts it.

After issuing “Post-Nothing” in April 2009, King quit his job, ditched his apartment and sold most of his possessions or sequestered them in storage as he geared up for the band’s first major tour.

After exactly one show, everything came to a halt after he suffered a perforated ulcer — a potentially fatal condition that arises when an untreated ulcer burns through the stomach wall, allowing digestive juices to leech into the abdominal cavity.

He was in the hospital for two weeks, then at his mom’s house recuperating for another two months. It was difficult not to view the setback through a fatalistic lens.

“It’s just so easy at the time to think that was your chance and by the time you recover from this, it’s just all going to have passed you by, people are already going to have moved on, they’re going to forget about the band, forget about the record,” he recalled.

“It was a difficult period in my life.”

Especially since it was that first tour that had loomed larger than the band’s first album as their primary goal all along. It’s unsurprising, then, that King and drummer David Prowse charged back out on tour before he’d really recovered.

It was a “little premature,” but it’s hard to detect any regret in King’s voice. It was the road that sharpened the band’s skills and finally gave them confidence in what they were doing.

“It’s not just friends or friends of friends at our shows anymore, it’s people you don’t know who actually like your band in the way that you like other bands,” he said.

“You realize that certain things that you’re doing must not be that bad or that stupid…. You just have a newfound confidence in what you’re doing.”

So much so, that King said the band wasn’t watching that carefully for reactions to the new music from the press and fans.

Whether people liked it or not, the band had cause for celebration regardless.

“There’s a reason all those second album cliches exist, the sophomore slump, etc. — mentally, doing the second record when you’ve been even quasi-successful on your first one, it’s no small feat,” he said.

“(But) we had a lot of confidence in what we were doing, regardless of how the record was received. I know it’s easy to say that when it seems like it is received in a positive way, but I feel like we were confident before anyone else had heard the record.

“This was the best thing we had done.”

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