Their Paltry Pint Of Blood

Japandroids “Arc of Bar”

“Arc of Bar” is a skyscraper of a song, building upwards towards the heavens with each verse as if the band was on a solemn mission to go get a beer with God Himself. A lot of beers. This is the most epic drinking song I have ever heard, and maybe the only one I’ve encountered that makes drinking booze seem like some kind of defiant, heroic duty. Brian King’s verses are wordy and deliberately grandiose, but the chorus is exactly the sort of cathartic, mindless bombast Japandroids does best: “Yeah yeaaaah! / YEAH YEAH!!!” This is seven minutes of theatrical rock music designed to make people go wild at a concert, and is such a convincing advertisement for inebriation that it’s a huge boon to the bartenders at every venue this band plays for the rest of the career. But as much as this song sets up a good time, it’s lost and confused and tortured at its core. It’s constantly grasping upwards at something – grace, glory, redemption? – but never getting a hold of anything. So it just keeps going higher and higher until it inevitably falls down.

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