The War on Drugs are a band made up of visible mechanisms and processes, like a giant skeleton watch or widescreen MRI scan. Tonight, the band’s linchpin, singing guitarist Adam Granduciel, lurches around inside a citadel of effects pedals, long hair swinging, shirt flapping, guitar pealing in the style of Neil Young. The encore of this two-hour show climaxes in a strobing cover of Young’s Like a Hurricane, with Granduciel swinging his guitar around his head in jubilation at the close.
When he sings, however, his phrasings betray an even greater affection for Bob Dylan. And that’s before you drill down into the War on Drugs’s lyrics. Just on the title track alone of Granduciel’s latest album, 2021’s sleek, tuneful I Don’t Live Here Anymore, the singer calls himself “a creature void of form” – a quotation from Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm – then recalls when “we danced to Desolation Row”.
