The Drums
Paradise Rock Club, Boston, MA
Saturday, May 4th, 2019
The trajectory of New York indie band The Drums has been marked in equal parts by evolution and upheaval. The band shed a band member for each of its albums from 2010 to 2014, leaving frontman Jonny Pierce as the sole survivor by the time he released the band’s fourth LP, 2017’s Abysmal Thoughts. But, despite the unsteady nature of the band’s earlier years, Pierce has built an oeuvre that has freed him to become more intimate and personal, showcasing an increasingly unfettered and fully-realized version of himself, culminating in the release of 2019’s Brutalism.
For a time, the band were best known for the pure infectiousness of singles like ‘Let’s Go Surfing’, and ‘Money,’ blending the sunny, upbeat guitars of home-grown LA surf rock with depressive lyrics that cemented Pierce as a Gen-X heir apparent to Morrissey, capturing the essence of youth spent navigating the minefields of relationships. But with Brutalism, Pierce, much like the “pretty cloud” in that record’s so-named track, has come closer and let his sorrows be more visible than ever before, transforming and restraining the pop sentiment. There are some classic, instantly-quotable, and bouncy cuts like ‘Body Chemistry’, but Pierce shifts often into a slew of sonic styles, perhaps best exemplified by the chameleonic ‘626 Bedford Avenue’, where he substitutes an address for a name amid an ever-changing soundscape that flits effortlessly between acoustic guitars on its hooks and a stomping drum beat anchoring a naturalistic bass line. Pierce has retained the generally-upbeat sound of previous Drums records, while moving away from the specific “surf” aesthetic the band cultivated in their early days.
Inside Boston’s storied Paradise Rock Club, Pierce commands the entire front half of the stage, giving him ample room for his theatrical personality. He moves around deliberately, bending and posing, offering up his microphone to the audience laid flat in the palm of his hand, enticing them to fill the mere inches between they and he with their voices, all raised in the iconic choruses of songs like ‘Best Friend’. When he leans against the barrier, hands from the crowd reach out eagerly, a testament to the undying power of the band’s music and indie pop as a whole. Behind him is a three-piece touring band who effortlessly switch between twangy, older standbys like the aforementioned ‘Let’s Go Surfing’, and new tracks like ‘Loner’, which finds Pierce confessing a fear of the whole world in the wake of the failed relationship that fueled much of Brutalism’s lyrical content. Pierce touches on all of the band’s LPs throughout the night, paying specific attention to ‘Portamento’, cheekily closing the main set with ‘How it Ended’ from that record.
In their tumultuous early days, Pierce told NME that he didn’t think that the band had a particularly long “shelf life”. That was 2011 – the better part of a decade later, however, he doesn’t show any signs of stopping. “The Drums” as a band, a solo project, a concept, what-have-you; has come to mean something new to Pierce, and with the vigor of that rearrangement and rebirth, it’s tantalizing to think what the next permutation of this project might bring as Jonny Pierce enters a second decade of plumbing the depths of self-discovery.
And I question your love for me
You tell me to have confidence
I question your love for me
‘Cause baby, you don’t make no sense
Please call me and tell me that you want me
'Cause right now my life is getting pretty ugly
And I wanna share a cigarette and I wanna go dancing in the rain
So call me and tell me that you want me
And let’s do it all again
