Fate & Alcohol

If this album was a little sluggish, it looks like they over-corrected it Fate & Alcoholsimplifying their girls and beers formula to its most basic and hoping that power chords and some over-the-top “wah-ohs” can fill in the gaps. “Positively 34th Street” hurts him Ancestor Bob Dylan with the thinnest outline of a dive bar version of a manic girl with a pixie dream: “A walkin', talkin', drinkin', smokin', gamblin' kinda girl,” King sings in an aching rest that sounds somewhere between Mac McCaughan with a stuffy nose and Ned Flanders covering Morgan Wallen. Throughout the album, women have the worst lyrical fate, becoming mannequins for empty signifiers like a “sequined dress, Chanel No. 5” in “Alice”. At their best, Japandroids appeals just as much to the women as to the dudes they've so often marketed themselves toward—believe it or not, we're just as often looking for oblivion at the bottom of Miller High Life—but here, they're cast as lazy stereotypes: the caretaker, the girl next door, the wise “lady” who gives advice about “Chicago.”

The stronger songs replace these glaringly obvious descriptors with vaguer gestures of eroticism and sadness. Even through its weary bitterness, there's a hint of excitement, underpinned by guitars that seem to stretch out into an endless reverberating highway reminiscent of the irresistible exuberance of early Japandroids. “Fugitive Summer,” which has the familiar red-tinted distortion that made the band sound both compressed and infinite, is the closest the album gets to the beam's transcendent energy. Holiday Rock—if you close your eyes when King sings about drinking a mickey drink “slow-leh,” it's almost like 2012 all over again.

These minor hits only make the rest of the album—from the wicked pun of “Eye Contact High” to the predictable chorus of “D&T” (it'll make you wish meant “death and taxes,” but no, unfortunately it's “drink and think”)—you feel terribly invited. In recent interviews the band admitted that they were writing albums just as cover to go on tour. With no tour planned for this latest album, it almost feels like an exercise in futility. On Fate & Alcoholthe Japandroids deliver the conviction that made their early records so great, but they can't overcome the palpable mismatch between their current lives and the characters their newer songs portray. Barroom anthems that once felt inspired because they sounded so alive, so generically in the first person, come across here as a poor impression of what a twenty-something might want to hear. There's a fundamentally happy ending for the Japandroids—one where they leave the bar and find the kind of love they once cried to the heavens for. If only their latest album reflected how far they've come.