The Drums, The Drums
Featured Album
Bringing the exuberance, posturing and gayness of dance-pop to a guitar-centric indie milieu
If you want it quick, short and bitchy: The Drums sound like a Factory Records band and look like the Jeep-cruising, Wham!-loving pack of male models in Zoolander. It helps to have both an appreciation for 1980s U.K. post-punk and a sense of humor when it comes to the Drums, a Brooklyn four-piece that brings all the exuberance, posturing and gayness of dance-pop (two members of the group were formerly in Elkland, a band whose career highlight was an opening slot for Erasure) to a guitar-centric indie milieu. Examined in the confined context of their queerness and New York-ness, the Drums are the antithesis of the dour and bookish Magnetic Fields; lead singer Jonathan Pierce is an all-American blonde, with bravura to spare and a wide-open chapbook of lyrics about finding joy in both love and loss.
"Let's Go Surfing" is a prime example of the Drums' strangely wholesome approach, a song so devoid of irony that a whistled melody hook and double-dutch chant of "Down, down baby, down by the rollercoaster" can only be interpreted as a sincere admiration for golden-oldies fare and pop music's more innocent tendencies. Yet it's all paired with single-string, New Order-style guitar lines, the cavernous echo of drums and vocals that evoke gray, post-industrial Manchester and, on a visual level, Pierce's reimagination of Ian Curtis's spastic dance moves on stage and in videos.
At some point it becomes very unclear whether The Drums is high camp, simultaneously retro with respect to different decades, or simply an idea that has gone unexplored by any other pop band in history. How else to reconcile the 1950s-era "Stand By Me" bass melody of "Down By The Water" in the vicinity of Pierce giddily dropping the Morrissey-esque couplet "You were my best friend/ But then you died"? Marvel at their earnest nature or suspect them of genre-blending guile, but rest assured that the Drums are no joke.
