Japandroids, Fate & Alcohol: On Being a Dude and the Damage Done

Image courtesy of -Anti Records

Japandroids released their fourth and final record, Fate & Alcohol, last week and so it seems like a good time to write about this band, the emotions their music stirred in listeners and who at least one of those listeners was. 

This is a good time for this reflection because Japandroids are saying this is it for the band – there will be no tour to accompany this album and they are, in their own words, “over.” Not broken up so much as done. Goodbye. 

Time will tell if Fate & Alcohol is the end or if money and myth will have the final say. But for now, Japandroids are over and I have good reason to believe them. Lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Brian King is 41 years old, one year sober and expecting his first child. The one interview they’ve given details a vague but stormy relationship between him and drummer David Prowse. Merle Haggard once asked if the good times were really over for good. For the Japandroids, the answer seems to be an acknowledgement that they’ve been over for some time. 

The good times add up to four stellar full-length studio albums, a solid compilation album and a particularly bad live album. At the top of this little hill is their 2012 record Celebration Rock, which looks to be a solid classic for the type of people that like cathartic punk rock and choruses that are fun to sing at the top of your lungs while driving down an open highway at fast speeds. A small, but vocal and prolific group, so I would imagine there will be much ink spilled over this relatively minor band.

Musically, that’s what’s here – epic rock music. There’s excellent drumming – without which this band would have no reason to exist. There are ringing guitars that I assume are being played in open or alternate tunings. There are lots of “WHOA-OHS” and “OH-OHs.” There are choruses. There are not many bridges. There are stirring codas. There are almost no guitar solos, if any. This is music made for the chorus, for the moment and to be played and heard live or through really loud speakers. This is Dude Rock and is often considered a touchstone of the entire Dudes Rock idea.

But what that moment is and what it represents boils down to the lyrics. Japandroids is an intensely romantic and poetic band, and yet the lyrical poetry of these songs is simple to the point of near-absurdity. On the surface, these lyrics are about a few repetitive themes: Chasing women and eventually getting them, Chasing good times and eventually finding them, and doing both of these things with friends that are presumably male and who, like the narrator himself, are half in the bag. 

Alcohol is the third member of the Japandroids and I can’t go any deeper without addressing its presence directly. Almost every Japandroids song seems to start after our narrator has downed a few drinks. There’s a meme that goes around that says no good story started with “I was eating a salad when,” and there are no salads in Japandroids lyrics. The setting for Japandroids lyrics are bars, city streets after bars have closed down, late-night diners and tour vans. This is music about partying.  

And that is why Japandroids lyrics are not actually about chasing women and eventually getting them or chasing good times and eventually finding them, or even about doing these things with friends who are also half in the bag. Japandroids songs are specifically about the feeling of chasing those things. Which means that Japandroids songs are as much about what they specifically are not about as much as they are the actual lyrical content of the songs. 

Let me put it another way that perhaps the sober King may relate. The serenity prayer, famously recited at the end of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings says “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” 

Much has been written this last decade about what is wrong with men. We are lonely. We are sexually frustrated. We are losing economic ground. We are toxic. We are unable to regulate or manage our emotions. There might even be, perhaps, something inherently wrong with being male. Larry McMurtry wrote that “There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help moving the piano.” 

Japandroids songs are not about these things, but they are written in real time by a Millennial man in our time, which means they are also very much about these problems. They are, in a sense, about running from these problems and about the inability to accept problems that are mostly – but not totally – incurable. So the songs are about chasing better feelings and about chasing better nights and about lost innocence. And they are about the idea of love – romantic, brotherly and mythic – the desire for it to cure these things and, with Fate & Alcohol, its inability to do so. 

In the closer on Near to the Wild Heart of Life, “In a Body Like a Grave,” King writes that there’s “heaven in the hellest of holes and a drink for the body is a dream for the soul.” Hope, mostly false hope, or better yet, doomed hope, colors in these songs. But what is the hope in? Mostly, the moments that feel better than life usually allows.  

I will return to this larger narrative about Japandroids lyrics in a moment, but let me return to the new record. I believe the key to this record is its centerpiece, “Upon Sober Reflection,” which King said he wrote as a kind of rejoinder to the rest of the band’s songs – it’s written from the subject of a Japandroids song, presumably a love interest and not the narrator himself. 

At night I lay awake, wondering why
I'm always the one who's standing by
Waiting warm for you to come to me
Without excuse and without apology

It ends with an ultimatum. 

Don't wanna know if you love me
If you ain't gonna do something about it

Japandroids songs feel good because they are meant to feel good. They are about holding onto the split second when everything – life, past, present and future feels good, even if it really isn’t. Japandroids songs run, but they don’t hide. But they run and run and run.

King has said he’s insulted when people mention Trump in relation to his music, but these albums are so much a reflection of the times in which they were written that I believe he is being avoidant and dismissive of a major aspect of his band and their role in the rock myth. 

Celebration Rock could have only formed in the last gasp of hope that Obama’s second term brought. Near to the Wild Heart of Life could only have nicked its sense of wariness and weariness from the onset of the cruel, masculine Trump years. And Fate & Alcohol can only exist in the context of the ensuing election and all the political and personal trauma of the Biden years. Even the long gap between albums marks the shifting political times. 

Yes, Japandroids is a Canadian band, but the geography of these songs, from “Fire’s Highway” to “Chicago,” are North American – with an emphasis on America. Likewise, King spent these years between Toronto, Mexico City and now, Michigan. Say what you will about Japandroids, but they are very much a travelogue of our chaotic times. 

All that running wears you out, and age and weary resignation play a major role in the psyche of Japandroids music. “Younger Us,” the first song that turned me on to the band, is about just what it sounds like – “Remember when we had them all on the run/And the night we saw midnight sun/Remember saying things like ‘we'll sleep when we're dead’/And thinking this feeling was never gonna end.”

An album later and the same resignation about time passing is there. In “In a Body Like a Grave,” King lifts up a lament that “age is a traitor and bit by bit/less lust for life, more talking shit.” 

To go back and listen to the band’s discography – like I have today – is to watch Icarus take flight and slowly tumble back to Earth. Post-Nothing finds joy in these feelings – of being out with the dudes, of chasing women, of drinking. Celebration Rock seeks to find transcendence in them – in embracing them and finding love and purpose in life and rock and roll. Wild Heart of Life reassures itself in them – that they are enough, that they will sustain and that they will prevail. Fate & Alcohol is an acceptance that the joy fades, that transcendence is a myth and that passion alone will not ultimately carry the day. 

In the Sterogum article, writer Ian Cohen wisely points out that the trail of alcoholism follows a familiar pattern – fun, fun with problems and finally just problems. Fate & Alcohol is a kind of reckoning with the problems. In “Chicago,” King writes about two hungover diner patrons in the harsh light of day, “sometimes silence says it all, but if you ask me, pathetic comes to mind.” In “Fugitive Summer” he sums it up as “.. when it comes to fucking up, firsthand experience.” 

I can relate, and I’m thinking other “dudes” my age can, too. My 20s and 30s were a messy cocktail of successes, failures, fun nights in North American cities, lots of gab, situations and ultimately, broken promises to myself and others. It was easy to believe during those days that the conviction of those promises was enough to cover the inability to deliver on them, but alas, it was not. As Fascism marched across the Earth and cruelty subdued the ineffective, inactive and unaware, the best I – like the Japandroids – could offer was another drink and the passion of days gone by. 

Like the Japandroids, age is hitting the Millenial man hard, and I can both see it and hear it in my friends as well as myself. More time spent rehashing the glory days and what they meant, less space in the current moment to embrace and call your own. The fear of becoming a bore looks increasingly real. And, much like you can see in the progression of portraits on the covers of each Japandroids album, age and the years are increasingly evident in my face and my gut. 

Glory days will pass you by. Rock and roll is mostly called “dad rock” and has about as much relevance to the present moment as a Dave Brubeck record did when I was 25. “In a Body Like a Grave,” indeed. As the Drive-By Truckers said in “Marry Me,” “Rock and roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies.” 

So the present moment is less about the massive nights and more about the moment when it’s time to settle the tab. For some it means medications, broken relationships and credit card bills. For others it’s a reckoning about what they said or did after the shots were downed. For some sobriety, for others, denial. And yet time marches on. The problems are not only here, they are bigger, and we are more powerless than ever to do anything about them. The taps are drained, the lights are on and it’s time to go. Where to is not the bartender’s problem. It’s yours. 

King is a notoriously controlled, private (some would say prickly) and literary soul, and beneath there is a maturity to his music that leads me to wonder if he has, in his drunken bravery, wandered onto some lessons and conclusions a few years before some of his contemporaries – and his audience. For that reason, not having a drunken, celebratory final tour may end up, like this record itself, being seen as a subtle stroke of genius. There is no parade. The party is over. Deal and heal if you can. 

To that end, Fate & Alcohol is a sober record, but not really a raw one. It isn’t written the morning after, but maybe a year or so after. A lot of the lyrics are about confronting the difficult truths we’d rather avoid, and, lest I make a propulsive rock record sound like a slog, about the cathartic joy in finally just facing your fears, your real fears – about being just one person in a Hellish world, about death and failed love and fear itself. On “D&T” King sings that “we all know I’m going to get in trouble tonight/Unless I fight back against these demons of mine.” The decision to decide – a moment more powerful than any known drink or drug. That feeling, that there is a lesson to be learned from all of this has been there since the beginning, and yet the lesson is painfully slow and elusive in revealing itself. And more so, what you do with the lesson – when knowledge becomes wisdom – is something perhaps saved for another record entirely. 

The women King writes about on this album are better drawn than past albums, where women were manifested but were not embodied, not real, ideas. There are sisters and partners and hard-working, straight-shooting women here – even though at times King tends to fall back on his familiar sketch of women as muses for his poetic, romantic musings. The sequencing of the record, though, seems intentional and as it goes along those idealized lines tend to fall away. King is not particularly good at writing about women and that’s OK, too, but it will be interesting to see – if he releases music in the future – if these sketches eventually deepen into portraits. 

It seems hard for me to believe that many Millennial women will want to listen to this record or to invest much time in the Millennial man’s messy and uneven journey to self-discovery. They have heard and seen all this shit before and have had to deal with the messy realities of pure passion and broken promises. And that is probably fine, if not wise. So, should this record exist? 

And this is the part where I struggle to say anything of value. Powerlessness is a difficult concept to grasp and it is an important part of processing any emotion or addiction. And powerlessness is more widespread than we’ve been led to believe. Ultimately, Japandroids is still a band about men and largely for men, especially a certain type of man who has a desire to sum up the ugly truths of humanity and life into more digestible, poetic morsels. Whether there is a need for that anymore, I do not know. I can say that on some level I desire it even if I don’t imbibe in it much at all these days. The future is under fire, the past is gaining ground. King is wise to offer up no easy answers – and that makes this a particularly good sobriety record that is devoid of the normal AA cliches and mantras. 

And yet, King is still dipping into the same bag of tricks he always has – fleeting moments of bravery, the lifesaving power of friends and lovers and the existential rush of simply being alive for it all. Of moments and books and poems and music and art as a balm to the harsh realities of humanity and its failures. Time will tell if he has more to say or if he discovers anything new. If he does, he will be the first. 

Again, in the Stereogum article, King sums up the drunken excesses of the later Japandroids tours by saying that “by the end we were basically just pirates.” There’s a loneliness to that story, but if there’s anything I can gather from Fate & Alcohol it’s that to the Japandroids we are still just pirates, but perhaps all of us – the listeners, the characters in the songs and the narrator himself – are coming to the realization that we are pirates sailing on the same ship, beating out a familiar rhythm, sailing from rough seas to calm waters to skirmish to port. There is no captain, there is only the sea. Sail on, sailor.