1 keeper
keeper avg .125
Though Japandriods' rise to critical acclaim could be considered a Cinderella story, their debut album's modest track count (and the band's lean head count) yields correspondingly modest results. The first three songs (and penultimate track "Sovereignty") are rousing enough, but only "Young Hearts Spark Fire"**** is sufficiently differentiated from the others in this bunch by Brian King's and David Prowse's human air-raid screams in the song's climax. This song especially is alive with the sound of Polyvinyl (who re-released the album), though the style of recording has rendered every song a crashing wall of noise, as opposed to the drier, more restrained recordings of the 90's midwest emo of the Ployvinyl I remember.
A couplet of the album's better tracks break from the punk tempo mold. "Heart Sweats" starts with thumping, rumbling rhythm, later broken up by crashing choruses. "Crazy/Forever" contains the most grand, stadium-size classic rock gestures along with some actual dynamics, though at 6-minutes it's too long (as the longest song on an album of punk songs mostly over 4-minutes). Rounding out the album, "Rockers East Vancouver" and closing track "I Quit Girls" are each based on a simple, some might say monotonous, rhythmic figure of stacked chords, repeated for most of the song. They're interesting but not interesting enough; the latter even sounds suspiciously like Smashing Pumpkins' "Mayonnaise" (1993).
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