Gig: Japandroids

Japandroids (Love is All / The Two Koreas)

The Horseshoe Tavern. Saturday, April 3, 2010.

"Good evening, we are The Two Koreas. We were put on this earth to entertain people who show up to concerts too early." Regardless of what you might think of them musically, The Two Koreas have their ways of entertaining a crowd — not in the least with vocalist Stuart Berman's always-entertaining banter, perhaps putting something he's studied in his rockcrit dayjob into practice. Because they show up with semi-regularity as a steadily-dependable opening act, it's a little easy to take the crew for granted, but within the little patch of rock'n'roll that they tend to, they do a good job, finding new applications for repetition, be it Fall-like chants or Krautrock beats.

This time round, the band played a whole bunch of new material, some of which saw them stretching out in different ways, whether in a "power ballad" (labelled "Geezer" on their setlist) or in "Karl Johans Gate (Suicide)", a sort of uptempo monotone slowburner stretching out about seven minutes. "Midnight Brown", however, kicks like a classic Two Koreas groover, so no radical re-inventions are expected on their forthcoming new one. There was also some older material, like "Retarded Architect (In Two Parts)" (from 05's debut Main Plates & Classic Pies and the singalong catchy "Cloth Coat Revolution" (from '07's Altruists). The room was filling in as they played and the band got a pretty good response from the crowd.

Listen to a track from this set here.

And it was an interesting crowd on hand. Although they undoubtedly have some overlapping appeal (and share a record label), it was clear that there were separate groups of the most ardent enthusiasts for each of the visiting bands. As they took the stage, Love is All, from Gothenburg, Sweden, had a fair number of supporters right up front. I know that they were the factor that had edged me over into buying a ticket for this show. I'd dug them quite a lot the last time I'd seen 'em, back in late 2008, and I think I'd have been pleased if they were headlining their own show. But even if they were the support act, it seemed prudent to catch them when they were in town — who knows when/if they'll be back in North America?¹

The band led off with "Bigger Bolder", the first track from new album Two Thousand and Ten Injuries, before looking back for a couple tracks, including "Talk Talk Talk Talk" (from their debut Nine Times That Same Song) with James Ausfahrt's skronky sax and "Wishing Well" with its Clean-biting keyboard hook, a standout from 2008's A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night. I've found the new album's production to be somewhat punchless when compared to their live energy, and songs like "False Pretense" and "Early Warnings" were played with an immediacy that the new album is lacking.

The band's main weapon is vocalist/keyb player Josephine Olausson, whose occasional yips and yelps never subtract from the songs' underlying catchiness, always balancing X-Ray Spex-styled punk and pop precision. Playing an efficient ten songs in just over half an hour, I could have certainly done with more, a sentiment that was echoed by some of the Love is All partisans up front.

Listen to a track from this set here.

But as the set ended, there was already a different crowd circulating up towards the stage. And though I attempted to hold my position, it didn't take more than a song or so into Japandroids' set for me to realize I needed to move. It seems like the band's fanbase isn't your watch-contemplatively-and-nod types, so the previous wall of polite Scandinavian pop-art-punk admirers were pushed back by a more laddish workin'-for-the-weekend bunch.

It's trite to say that the band fed off the energy of the crowd, but here was a case where it really seemed like precisely that as the devoted throng was moshing and stage diving from the get-go, shouting and singing along. No wonder, then that the pair looked well-pleased to be in their "second home" city, absorbing the energy from their last night in Canada before heading back to less-won-over crowds Stateside.

Starting with "The Boys Are Leaving Town", the duo proceeded to power through the entirety of Post-Nothing — even the rarely-played "Wet Hair" got an airing, "for only the second time in Canada". They threw in a couple of their EP tracks and finished with covers of Big Black's "Racer X" and Mclusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions" for a pretty hefty seventy-five minute set.

I suppose I'd back off some of my earlier claims that Japandroids are the new Loverboy, but there is a populist rawk-out simplicity underpinning their songs, no matter how much enthusiastic garage-scuzz they coat them with. With a surfeit of new material, the band is bigging up their songs, a few of which now come with increasingly extended instrumental intros — don't think of it as noodling so much as the jagged burst of gasping required for band and crowd alike to regain their breath after each jam. This on top of a general sonic expansion, such as with "Heart Sweats", now part of a ten minute-plus epic with the song bleeding seamlessly into "Darkness on the Edge of Gastown".

For "Rockers East Vancouver", with drummer David Prowse taking lead vocals, Brian King said, "I'm going to dance around and rock out, I hope you guys do too." The crowd needed no such invitation. For anyone looking for a sweaty, participatory time, Japandroids is money well spent, no doubt. For those taking a more considered view of things, though, a little bit less so. The band's success has given them some ride-the-moment tenacity — they've sunk their teeth in and aren't going to stop the momentum, touring relentlessly for the past year with no end yet in sight. The downside is that there isn't really any new material from the band — so in one sense this wasn't all that different a show than I saw when they were here the last time around. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it, but it didn't feel like an entirely new experience. Those who haven't caught Japandroids yet should undoubtedly catch 'em the time time or two they pass through town, though I'm willing to wait for the next phase to start before I check 'em out again.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Perhaps somewhat ironically, when I saw 'em that time, it was mostly because I'd bought a ticket to see their opening band — in that case Crystal Stilts.