Japandroids and guitar nostalgia

My style of guitar playing has changed over the years. I know that this is common for anyone who plays any instrument and who also writes music as well. When I first started playing the guitar, my influences came from the 1990’s “number bands” as I like to call them. Third Eye Blind, Eve6, Blink-182 and others without numbers like The Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Incubus, and Weezer also were heavily involved in my influential sound. I played the acoustic for about two years before buying an electric. Once I had an electric, I had to have a pedal for it because all of my favorite bands used copious amounts of effects in each of their songs. Japandroids have found the sound that I searched for hours at a time to create. Their distorted guitars sound like they have layered distortion pedal upon distortion pedal and then cranked their tube amps to make sure that the point has come across clearly. Their album, Post-Nothing, is eight songs of this same sound. Finding just the right effect is hard to do sometimes, and each one is very individualistic. But, it is the same distortion from song to song in an almost unfortunate way. The drums are bashingly wonderful and the vocals have calmed their screams down enough to make a melody evident, but there isn’t much variation amongst the tracks.

With all of this being said, this two-piece band from Vancouver does sound fantastic at their finest. They took the sound of the heaviest distortion I ever mustered on my first electric and actually made it into music. They are an inspiration (especially for my two piece band-by-correspondence, “Bow&Quiver”). I’m posting two of their songs: The Boys Are Leaving Town; and I Quit Girls. The first track is the first song I heard by them and the second is the one step of variation they take during their album.

On an unrelated note, I know prefer to play and write folk inspired songs.

Why I sing…