At this point, I don’t think I need to spend a lot of time describing what Celebration Rock actually sounds like. Critics like myself had to get more creative in 2012, whereas nowadays, I can just say “dudes rock” and be done with it — “dudes” as either an adjective and a noun, “rock” as either a verb or a noun. It’s a non-toxic masculinity, where a constant chorus of whoas, yeahs, high-fives, and bear hugs aren’t deflections from sharing deeply held emotions to friends and partners but expressions of them in their purest form — something closer to a purifying primal scream than the oversharing and self-deprecation and buzzwords that have arisen alongside the mainstreaming of therapeutic language.
For all of its bluster and overstatement and astronomical stakes, King taps into something volatile and vulnerable: “I’m talking about the night you felt that way — that one time,” he explained. Just about every second of this album hits that sore spot from multiple angles — the lifelong pursuit of trying to put words to that indescribable feeling and also the fear that it really was that one time.
Even though Japandroids released a legendary rock album, it does not present King and Prowse as people who were born for this shit, a la their heroes in Guns N’ Roses or AC/DC (let alone U2). It does not strike me as a work of magic or genius, even the kind exhibited by Paul Westerberg or Robert Pollard, guys who have likely forgotten more songs than Japandroids will ever write. They don’t even provide the lifeblood of punk rock, the vicarious thrill of seeing a couple of normal guys on stage and thinking, “I could do that.” Even in 2012, they were an outlier amongst wildly prolific garage rockers (Ty Segall, Cloud Nothings), DIY rawk lifers (Screaming Females, the Men), crusty post-rock titans (GY!BE, Swans), and vibey visionaries (DIIV, Tame Impala). Japandroids embodied maybe the dirtiest word in indie rock — tryhard.
Rather than trying to deny this obvious quality, it inspired one of the most insightful things I’ve ever seen an artist say about their own music: “There’s a difference between people who are born with that special thing and people who love the people who are born with that special thing so much that they want to try their best to get as close as they can to it.”