JAPANDROIDS GIVE FANS A FAREWELL GIFT WITH FINAL ALBUM ‘FATE & ALCOHOL’

ALBUM REVIEW | Japandroids – Fate & Alcohol

Japandroids recently released their first album in several years, FATE & ALCOHOL, on ANTI- Records. It’s a bittersweet release for the Japandroids fandom, as it came accompanied not by the usual tour announcement and press appearances, but rather with a message that this will be Japandroids final project – their last full-length record – and there will not be a tour.

Japandroids will always and forever be remembered for their wild, exhausting live show, and it’s a real shame that these tracks will not be present in those memories. If any other band released an LP this alive and brimming electricity and didn’t tour it; it would be the biggest misstep of their career. Rather than see this as a missed opportunity, though, I prefer to see it as a final project – David and Brian got together, one last time, to distil everything about Japandroids that you love into one last great studio record.

FATE & ALCOHOL is Japandroids to the core, full of the high-octane energetic celebratory rock ‘n’ roll the Canadian duo is known for. Each track paints its own punk-noir fairy tale, from the airport bars to the cold Vancouver December, from “two bourbon and two beer” to “prairie oysters when you get back.” It explodes forward, rich in narratives, yearning, and hope, somehow screaming at you in both full colour and harsh black & white at the same time. It’s full of mystery and wonder, revelling in the stories of life’s mistakes and second chances. FATE & ALCOHOL celebrates living life, and instils in you a sense of life, life lived right fucking now, in the way only Japandroids can.

Some tracks on the record are instantaneously new favourites; I had “Alice” on repeat for three days straight. From top to bottom, FATE & ALCOHOL is maybe the most consistent Japandroids release. It’s sharp as a knife, without a wasted second anywhere. None of the songs have outros, or extraneous choruses, and every single track leaves you wanting more. There are highlights for sure, the aforementioned “Alice” alongside “Chicago,” “Fugitive Summer,” and “Positively 34th Street” all deserve a place in any conversation about Japandroids’ best tracks, but there aren’t any clear clunkers. Despite being ten tracks instead of the usual eight, I can’t think of a single track I’d cut from the album.

FATE & ALCOHOL doesn’t have the DIY lightning-in-a-bottle capture of debut POST-NOTHING, it never gets quite as intense as sophomore record CONTINUOUS THUNDER, and it doesn’t represent a step forward in the same way that the experimentation of 2017’s NEAR TO THE WILD HEART OF LIFE did. No, FATE & ALCOHOL is refined and fully mature. It is infectious, anthemic, and beautiful, and it probably contains some of their best songwriting. Regardless of all that, it’s truly difficult to say where FATE & ALCOHOL will sit in the canon of the now-a-legendary-former-band Japandroids because, more than anything else, without a tour, it won’t have the opportunity to grab hold of our hearts and souls. I know that I, personally, really wish it could have had that chance, because it is fucking great. So I’m left thankful that it exists, because FATE & ALCOHOL makes me thankful that I exist. Thankful that I get to live, and make mistakes, and meet people and be in their stories, and have them in mine. Thankful that I get to bang my head to a massive cacophony that is magically only guitars, drums, vocals, and dreams. But being thankful for those things doesn’t mean that I’m not grieving the fact that I can’t do those things, at the same time, to this particular soundtrack.