The Drums – Jonny

Thirteen years is plenty of time to wear out Joy Division CDs, enough that one might wonder when The Drums’ main-brain Jonny Pierce will airlift himself to the present. The driving, reverberated rhythm section and sparkling overdriven guitars distinctive to The Drums’ sound a decade ago are curiously still their calling card, leaving long time listeners in a similar spot to 90s AC/DC fans: all the usual boxes have been enjoyably checked, but the discovery is absent. Jonny arrives after a decade as the same well-paced and tender exercise in running in place, exactly where they always leave off.

While comments about the instrumentation can be directly lifted from Joy Division reviews, the odd Postal Service comparison, or previous Drums records, the uniqueness of Jonny is in its pacing. Sprinkled throughout the tracklist are codas masking themselves as interludes: not distinct enough to form their own idea, yet not homogenous enough to cleanly fit into their parent tracks. The root ideas themselves are youthful and tinted with remembrance, steeped in the melancholy of the sole songwriter able to keep the charade of childhood going. However, if Pierce’s point is his current emotional state within arbitrary, stock post-punk instrumentals, one would wonder why he doesn’t pursue a podcast instead. Is it ever fortunate for a band to find their music as a middleman?

Listen to: Obvious, Plastic Envelope, The Flowers