The Guitarist Of The Year: 7. Adam Granduciel

The War On Drugs have flirted with harrowing insularity, but on the immaculate Lost In The Dream they explode into Technicolor. Songwriter and guitarist Adam Granduciel howls atop long abandoned highways, he drifts away into the murky ether alone with his regrets and he soars across the sky accessing a hitherto unknown recess of human warmth. In doing so The War On Drugs have accomplished something quite extraordinary. In one fell swoop they have merged the lonesome artistic fringe with the shameless stadium-sized sweeps of the great rock classicists.

The result is a band who can dip effortlessly from the painstaking lows and broken swan dive soloing of “Suffering” to the timeless travelling Americana of “An Ocean Between The Waves”. There are echoes of Dylan, Simon, Springsteen, Dire Straits and even Bryan Adams, but this is no hollow imitation or exercise in aesthetics: Adam Granduciel is forging his own path. Using an impressionistic brushstroke The War On Drugs smear edges and blur lines; creating a dream-like-haze around their painfully rooted songwriting. Listening to Adam Granduciel’s homespun concoctions is akin to reliving your darkest decaying memories through a Valium cloud of obfuscating guitars and alluring synths.

Is Lost In The Dream pleasure or torture? There is no easy answer. Adam Granduciel is content to drift and linger in the vicinity of so many conflicting emotions that the listener can only twist in the wind along side him. The guitar work is devastatingly instructive, raising and deflating spirits as we hang on Adam’s every word. And they are gorgeous, carefully chosen words capable of contorting narrative and inverting sentiment with a single syllable.