Now I had mentioned before that the Drums drew heavily from both Joy Division and the Smiths, but I thought I would take this chance to show what I really meant by comparing two songs from The Drums and The Smiths.
Lets start with the Smiths. Johnny Mar. Morrissey. Magic. There is something perfect about those two together but I have no idea what it is, and frankly how could I? Im not a chemistry major after all. There are two types of Smiths songs, there are the deathly serious, seriously honest, and honestly touching type that include How Soon is Now, There is a Light That Never Goes Out, and Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. These are songs that just breath and feel human; as I said there is a disarming honesty about them that is far too often missing from recordings. Then there is the other type of which Girlfriend in a Coma is one, and this one is also a bit disarming. It’s the silly song, the joke, the sound that makes you laugh. Of all the bands that have written joke songs and gotten away with it, no band, and I mean no band, has done so more than The Smiths, their tongue in cheek humor was unprecedented and has remained so since. Numbers like Girlfriend in a Coma and Bigmouth Strikes Again blend so well into their dark sad honest material because of how dark and sad their jokes are really, and that’s another reason as to why it just works. Girlfriend in a Coma is about, what else, a girlfriend who falls into a coma, but instead of the song being frantic or grieving as a song of that nature could be, the singer reports on “…times I could have murdered her”. And the Chorus is just great, violins and other classical instrumentation burst into the song and Morrissey asks so sarcastically “do you really think she’ll pull through?”.
So Imagine my delight and surprise when I first listened to The Drums debut album and the first line on the first track is “You were my best Friend, but then you died”. That song, and a choice other number of songs from that album so well reflect the ironically tragic sound that The Smiths so well pulled off in the eighties. The strange thing about the Drums though that really separates them from The Smiths is that instead of singing about sad things in an honest way, they just use Joy Division-esque guitar lines. There is not a single sad song on The Drums self-titled, but if you only listened to any given guitar riff from it you would immediately disagree. Ian Curtis and the rest of Joy Division were some of the greatest and most heartbreaking songs ever written, and its interesting to see a indie surf pop band adopt their sound. Not only have they done that, as Ive mentioned before, they also juxtapose that immediately recognizable sound with The Smiths sort of silly humor, which creates a fantastically strange experience.
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