Japandroids - P ost-Nothing - 2009

Japandroids - P ost-Nothing - 2009

01 The Boys Are Leaving Town
02 Young Hearts Spark Fire
03 Wet Hair
04 Rockers East Vancouver
05 Heart Sweats
06 Crazy/Forever
07 Sovereignty
08 I Quit Girls

Japandroids are two guys from Vancouver who make distortion-cranked garage-rock anthems about fleeting youth: the boys leaving town, drinking, hurting, French kissing some French girls, and then quitting girls altogether. Their debut album, Post-Nothing, was originally going to be self-released last fall, but now it's set to come out this spring, in Canada only, on Unfamiliar. "Young Hearts Spark Fire" is just one of the raggedly emotive standouts on the record, young hearts igniting the duo's stripped-down drums-and-guitar setup into an explosive thing, equal parts insolence and grandeur.

"We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying," members Brian King and David Prowse cry out, in the kind of doomed-romantic instant quotable we used to get from fellow Canadians the Constantines. The whole song hinges on this contrast between innocence and destruction. It's tuneful and universal enough to have been produced as a radio-ready pop-punk single, but it has the kind of volatile churn you'd expect from a band known to cover Mclusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions", which helps to make all its conflicted emotions sound-- for lack of a less controversial word-- real. "I don't wanna worry about dying/ I just wanna worry about those "sunshine girls," Japandroids conclude. "Only the Good Die Young" was bullshit-- these guys are too young, and too good, to burn out just yet.

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