Band of the year, or fight of the year?
What's the best album of 2014? Maybe it's Lost in the Dream, the third release by Philadelphia rock band the War on Drugs. The album, which came out in March, further refines main man Adam Granduciel's singular achievement of combining Bob Dylan- and Bruce Springsteen-style heading-down-the-highway classic rock romanticism with the hypnotic grandeur of German motorik ambient bands like Kraftwerk and Neu.
What's the best album of 2014?
Maybe it's Lost in the Dream, the third release by Philadelphia rock band the War on Drugs. The album, which came out in March, further refines main man Adam Granduciel's singular achievement of combining Bob Dylan- and Bruce Springsteen-style heading-down-the-highway classic rock romanticism with the hypnotic grandeur of German motorik ambient bands like Kraftwerk and Neu.
It's a powerful step up for a band that's earned a growing audience and kudos in the United States and around the world. In June, when most music journos published their best music of the year (so far) lists - because the Internet needs more lists - Lost in the Dream landed in the top spot at Paste magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and British newspaper the Guardian.
Or maybe the best album of 2014 is Benji, the sixth album by Sun Kil Moon, the mostly solo guitar and voice project by 47-year-old songwriter Mark Kozelek, who's recorded dozens of melancholy albums under his own name and with the Red House Painters.
Named for the 1974 hit movie about an adorable mixed-breed dog, Benji is a beautiful breakthrough record for Kozelek. It perfects his chosen sad-dude method. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is paired with seemingly unfiltered autobiographical information. It's often tragic (there are two songs about family members who, improbably, died in aerosol can fires), frequently moving (as in the self-explanatory "I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love") and sometimes funny ("Dogs," about his comic early sexual history).
So what do Lost in the Dream and Benji have in common?
Until a fateful evening in September at the Ottawa Folk Festival, nothing. On that Saturday night, however, the War on Drugs, fresh off a mesmerizing secret show the night before at Johnny Brenda's in Fishtown, happened to be on an outdoor stage adjacent to where Kozelek was playing.
Festivals are wonderful places for music discovery. But they can also be places where acts get grumpy because sound bleeds over from the much louder band playing on the stage next door.
That's what happened in Ottawa, where Kozelek, by all accounts, let his displeasure be known by introducing a song with the make-believe title "The War on Drugs Can - " [the reader can imagine the rest]. He also went on to disparage the band, calling them, among other things, "John Cougar Mellencamp."
Nothing's more fun that a feud, right? It would be an understatement to say the online music press began frothing at the mouth at the prospect of an indie-rock scrap à la Beatles vs. Stones or Tupac Shakur vs. the Notorious B.I.G., or the Dixie Chicks vs. Toby Keith or the Black Keys vs. Justin Bieber or Kanye West vs. Jimmy Kimmel.
In general, these mano a mano - or, in the case of recent conflicts between, say, Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea, womano a womano - face-offs are good for business, as long as everyone's name gets spelled correctly and nobody winds up seriously injured. On the influential music site Stereogum last week, the three most popular posts all addressed the Kozelek vs. War on Drugs rivalry.
Calling it a rivalry, though, is misleading, because from the start, it's been pretty much a one-sided attack, closer to big bully Kanye jumping up on stage with Taylor Swift at the VMAs. After the Ottawa show, the War on Drugs did tweet: "seems like it might have been partially in jest so whatever. Just upsetting to me as a fan that's all. We're just doing what we do." But that's been the sum of their response so far.
Kozelek, in the meantime, has stayed on the offensive. First, he seemed to apologize to the band in a statement posted on his website. Then he insisted he had not apologized, and after listening to a War on Drugs song, described their sound as "Don Henley meets John Cougar meets Dire Straits meets 'Born in the USA'-era Bruce Springsteen." (He has a point about the Dire Straits influence.)
He also challenged the band to let him join them onstage Oct. 6 in San Francisco and play a song he wrote, whose title is full of bad words not permitted in this family newspaper. When that RSVP, unsurprisingly, wasn't forthcoming, Kozelek released the seven-minute song on Monday.
It's a deadpan doozy. Some of it is funny, presuming Kozelek is joking, as when he sings, "I met War on Drugs tonight and they're pretty nice/But their hair is all long and greasy, hope they don't have lice." But mostly it seems like a silly exercise that's strangely mean-spirited, both toward the Philadelphia band, whose sound he (wrongly) labels "beer commercial rock," and more tellingly, their fans, to whom he condescends as "bridge and tunnel people" on "their big night out."
As a fan, I'm not so naive as to think some of my pop-culture heroes aren't despicable swine. And it's always a good idea to trust the art, not the artist. Still, it's never fun for kids to watch their parents fight, and it's a drag when two acts who've made some of your favorite music of the year get tangled up in a pointless kerfuffle that threatens to reduce them to indie-rock gossip-page caricatures. (Especially when you'd be better off listening to the War on Drugs cover of Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," recently recorded for a Minneapolis radio station. It hit the Web this week.)
Kozelek is the one who comes off like a jerk in this episode. He's surely guilty of what Meredith Graves, lead singer of the stellar punk band Perfect Pussy, labeled "emotional abuse" in a damning feminist critique of the diss track at online music site Pitchfork last week. It's as though Kozelek always wanted to start a rap feud, so he kicked the War on Drugs in the schoolyard even though they don't have anything to fight about.
He hasn't popped off badly enough to ruin Benji - it still sounded great when I listened to it while writing this column. But there's a lesson here about how the free-flowing, unedited approach to songwriting that works so well on the album might not go so well when it comes to your public persona, particularly in a social-media world where everything you say is repeated and retweeted a thousand times over. As the War on Drugs seems to understand, sometimes the best strategy is to keep your mouth shut.
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@delucadan
