celebration rock

music:  The album Celebration Rock by the Japandriods has been out for a couple of months now.  I just recently picked it up, and decided that this is something that needs to be talked about.  For anyone who doesn't know, The Japandroids are a two person band out of Canada that has built their careers on fun hook filled rock.  I don't know if this is the culmination of this effort, being that I have not listened to a lot of their music.  All I can say is that it sure as hell seems like it.
Celebration Rock as I listen to it (now over and over again) is one of those albums that seems to embody the spirit of rock.  The fun, straightforward, and sometimes raw and raunchy nature of the album is exactly what the genre has been about since its inception.
This is not to say it is in the vain of a classic rock album.  This is not AC/DC or Van Halen or Guns 'n' Roses, specifically on Appetite For Destruction.  Those albums epitomized rock as a lifestyle.  The booze and drugs and girls, especially the girls, seem to be nothing short of a daily occurrence for bands as they worked the sunset strip or toured the world.  This was not only the truth, but the feeling you got from listening to their albums.  There was a lack of specificity in the feel and style of the lyrics that created a lifestyle as opposed to a more singular and specific experience.
That singular experience is what you get from the Japandriods.  Keep in mind that this singularity is no less universal.  It is just a vibe.  That vibe is not "This is our lives everyday, getting hammered and doing drugs and banging the hottest chicks ever while rocking 24/7/365".  When you listen to Celebration Rock it is more of a "I feel like total hell this morning but the more I remember about the night I had that made me feel this way, it was totally worth it".  I have no idea under what influence the Japandriods made this album, but that is how it makes me feel.  The album sounds like they just had the most amazing night full of youthful exuberance at a party out by the lake where there are 120 people and the sunset was movie picturesque as the kegs were flowing, dudes were sneaking off into the woods to have sex with their girls in secrecy (even though everyone saw them sneak off) and the rest of the party was left to get hammered and smoke up on the greatest night of all of their young lives out by this mythical perfect lake that exists in the mind of all those who have been to "that party".  Then they woke up the next morning, and as the haze of that perfectly youthful and carefree night cleared, these two guys remembered what happened and realized, "We need this night to be an album."  That album became Celebration Rock.  An album filled with hilariously blunt lyrics about booze and sex on the best night of someones lives set to the backdrop of music that is basically two dudes pounding the shit out of their instruments and filling the chorus of every single song with Whoas and Yeahs.
I really have no idea if this scenario I just talked about really happened.  All I can say is that this is how the album makes me feel and what it makes me think of.  It is the best of the best night in a youth that mostly really exists at parties on lakes with kegs of shit beer.  But it is better than that.  It is better than the version of that night shown in high school movies scenes like the prom scene in American Pie at Stiffler's lake house, which is the best possible version of that.  It is better than that.  It is the celebration of that.  And a celebration of what those nights are all about:  youth and rock.