Brian King of Japandroids is often stereotyped as a Talking Ken doll filled with AC/DC quotes—push his buttons and you're getting, in some combination: Whoa! Yeah! Alright! Girls! Drinking! An unintended upside is that there's little room in his vocabulary for the thinnest and most frequently used word in the indie rock lexicon: "I" appears on their beloved 2012 album Celebration Rockonly twice. And it takes nearly a half-hour for its grand entrance, in the context of the greatest boast of post-break-up survival skills of the 21st century: "You're not mine to die for anymore, so I must live!" It's defiant but respectful, a version of the Bruce Springsteen cameo in High Fidelitythat's aged much, much better.
Granted, most Japandroids songs use first-person pronouns, frequently in the plural—blazing down Fire's Highway is even better when your best friend calls shotgun. But while King—white t-shirt, jeans, leather jacket, tousled hair, tall and conventionally masculine—looks like an appropriate emissary for the tall tales told in Japandroids songs, at no point does the listener ever have to think of them as having happened to Brian King; none of these stories really belong to him, nor should they because almost none of it is based in tangible reality. If King claimed them as his own, he'd be deemed full of shit, or at least ironic. Or Japandroids are just viewed somewhere between the Darkness and Diarrhea Planet rather than the Replacements and Guns 'n Roses. But by taking himself out of the frame, Celebration Rockread like public domain, belonging to no one and thus big enough to include everyone.
Every single review of Japandroids' new album Near to the Wild Heart of Lifewill undoubtedly kill a few paragraphs reiterating what you already know from the interviews: the production values are higher, the tempos are slower, there's more breathing room for everything that would otherwise be heard as narcing on the past proceedings; acoustic guitars, synths, girlfriends. Those matter, but they're not important. The only real difference between Near to the Wild Heartand Celebration Rockis that King uses his first "I" within the first verse of the first song. Four and a half years after making the best rock record of the decade, Japandroids feel finally secure enough to write autobiography. It's the best thing they could've possibly done.
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