Review: Japandroids, 'Near To The Wild Heart Of Life'

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Rock 'n' roll so often boils down to simple pursuits: the search for love, sex, escape, revenge, satisfaction, or some signifier of freedom and home. But for Brian King and David Prowse of Japandroids, that central pursuit is often majesty itself. Listen to the Vancouver duo's 2012 masterpiece Celebration Rock — one of the most appropriately titled albums of all time — and you'll hear song after song fixated on a bone-deep intention to feel more, stay raw, let rip, and "yell like hell to the heavens." A natural resistance to aging and decline provides plenty of subtext, but really, the band specializes in anthems about the power and the glory of simply feeling alive.

Japandroids' new album is titled Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, so those themes remain in full effect from the opening drum fills of the title track. But the themes here are a bit more expansive: Released four and a half years after Celebration Rock, these eight songs are clearly the product of reflection, upheaval and the soul-searching that so often comes with travel and time off. The concept of home springs up repeatedly in Near To The Wild Heart Of Life's first two songs, as the title track details a need to leave ("And it got me all fired up / to go far away") and "North East West South" paints a lovingly patriotic, riff-rocking picture of Canada and its gravitational pull.

Elsewhere on Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, King and Prowse let their sound meander a bit more than usual, as "Arc Of Bar" sprawls out for seven and a half minutes, while the slow-building "True Love And A Free Life Of Free Will" weighs the imagined majesty of the unknown against the long-sought comfort of contentment. If Celebration Rock was two guys' way of romanticizing the messiness of a dramatic past — real and rediscovered — then Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is its natural sequel, re-envisioning youth as a passageway to a new and better place.