Album of the Week: Celebration Rock

I haven’t known a life without summer vacation since 1973. After having been a regular part of life for so long, my summers have a feel: Freedom, openness. An absence of structure, an abundance of possibility. 

Summer starts incrementally for me: Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial beginning, since it has the first day off I’ve had in about two months. June first is when the weather nerds on TV banter about Meteorological Summer to remind everyone they’ve received an education and can do more than dress up and smile. For my corner of the world, the first Friday in June ushers in another level summer when we have Track and Field Day at school, signaling to everyone that the academic year is almost over. Next Thursday will be the last day of school for the kids, then Friday is the last for the teachers. After that summer has basically arrived. Because seriously, other than the people in charge of setting text in the calendar factory, who considers June 20 to be part of spring?

With all the time and opportunity and warm weather, summer quickly becomes a season filled with celebrations, planned and spontaneous, genuine and accidental. One of the albums that has become a standard summertime soundtrack for me is the appropriately named “Celebration Rock” by the Canadian duo Japandroids. The band released a new album this past winter, “Near to the Wild Heart of Life.” It’s more mature and subdued, and probably my favorite album of 2017 so far. I’ve had more time to spend with “Celebration Rock” though, so it would probably get my nod as the favored of the two.

The album consists of fast, loud, pounding anthems ideal for the summer, and perfect for summer driving. Every song sounds almost exactly the same, which is usually a negative, but in this case makes the songs seem more like separate movements in one thematic piece of music. They're all centered around barely contained chaos, noise, and energy. Lyrics like “We yell like hell to the heavens” are less about being statements of rebellion as they are of ferocious joy. Some of the song titles make strong enough declarations of this on their own: “Fire’s Highway;” “Adrenaline Nightshift;” “Continuous Thunder. The guitars and the drums throughout the album seem to be in competition to be louder and faster than each other without losing control, while the backing vocal harmonies sound like a garage full of friends trying to annoy the neighbors late at night on a summer weekend.

The first and the last sounds you hear on the album are the popping explosions of distant fireworks. My house is circled by four different Minneapolis suburbs, none of which is more than three miles away from me. Because of this, I hear fireworks going off almost weekly from some summertime festival or celebration. More often than not I can follow the sound if I step outside at night, and even see quick flashes of color erupting just above the distant horizon. With my last benchmark of summer only days away, I’m looking forward to getting back to those nights and those celebrations, and having this album playing in the car for some of those long summer drives.