CD reviews: The Drums

The debut from New Yorkers The Drums is joyous and shiny and summery and optimistic and urgent and many of the other things that make pop music fun.

Yet there’s something perturbing about the music The Drums make, a sense that all is not quite right.

The Drums is a sound-for-sound facsimile of Power, Corruption & Lies-era New Order, early Cure on Prozac. There’s nothing wrong with that; harking back to earlier eras is an honourable tradition. But the current (new) wave of 1980s revivalists is different to previous generations.

The thing that links the Rolling Stones’ – or Jack White’s – appropriation of American blues, or The Beatles’ attempts to do Motown or, for that matter, Oasis’s attempts to do The Beatles, is that in each case the artists were searching for what they believed to be ‘authenticity’.

I wonder what The Drums are searching for. If anything, the notable quality of the sort of synthesized music The Drums make is its artifice, its lack of authenticity.

It’s no surprise, then, that many of the songs don’t always ring true. When lead Drummer Jonny Pearce sings ‘You’re my best friend and then you died/And how will I survive’ you don’t quite believe his pain; it’s almost as if he’s gauging the reaction of everyone to make sure they’re watching him be miserable.

The sense that the band are slightly disconnected from their own experiences continues elsewhere. ‘Let’s Go Surfing’, for example, could as easily be about flicking on the computer as catching a wave at Piha.

Yet ultimately the distinction doesn’t really matter. The Drums’ music is close enough to being a real (though not authentic) experience that it makes no difference that it’s not. That fact and, of course, the propulsive music that papers over the cracks, will be more than enough for most listeners. Which is exactly how it should be. RB

SOUND: 2

MUSIC: 3.5