Japandroids pick their favourite song by The Replacements
For a moment there, it really did seem like Japandroids were the natural heirs to The Replacements’ bar-band rock throne. The Hold Steady were a little too heady. The Gaslight Anthem a little too slick. The Cribs a little too spiky, and Green Day far too big. Brian King and David Prowse’s Vancouver firebrands, despite hailing from the true north, strong and free, had all the tools needed to be The Mats for a new generation. Maybe that’s exactly why they weren’t.
After all, and I’m sorry to say this, but if you share any meaningful DNA with The Replacements then you’re going to have the fuckup gene in you, let’s be real here. That was arguably what defined Paul Westerberg’s bunch of beer-swilling maniacs: their worst enemy was themselves. The band could have been the biggest of their generation. Tom Petty but with boyband good looks. REM but fun. Nirvana, seven years early, without the heroin.
Yet, the band would continuously shoot themselves in the foot with a near sexual degree of relish. Japandroids weren’t quite that proudly self-destructive, but only because the stakes were much, much lower. They were two Canadian hipsters pounding out thunderous rock ‘n’ roll jams for the love of pounding out thunderous rock ‘n’ roll jams. Their ceiling was probably Death From Above 1979, The Mats’ was biggest band in the world.
Yet still, there’s an element of what could have been when it comes to Japandroids. Mainly because their 2012 album Celebration Rock is a certifiable masterpiece from one of the last sources you’d ever expect a masterpiece to come from. These two blokes with all the star power of the brick wall that’s seemingly ever-present behind them when their pictures are taken, dropping the rock album of the decade and then just shrugging whenever people mention it.
Were The Replacements an influence on Japandroids?
Despite their differences, though, the comparison maintains. At their best, both bands made heart-bursting, life-affirming rock ‘n’ roll that, despite their aloof affect, fully buys into the idea that rock music can change a life for the better. After all, it did for them. This bunch of beer-swilling ne’er-do-wells became legends off the back of it, and if it worked for them, then anyone could do it.
This was no accident either; both King and Prowse are die-hard Replacements fans who have never been afraid to sing their praises to the high heavens. Which makes sense, this is a band who named a song ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ with complete sincerity long before they made an album-length ode to the transcendental nature of getting loaded with your friends. This is not a band afraid of wearing their heart on their sleeve, and King’s favourite Replacements song is a perfect example of this.
When asked in an interview with Pitchfork what his favourite song by The Mats was, King responded “That’s a very tough question– probably “Answering Machine”. That was one that first pulled me into the Replacements when I was in my first year at university. It sounds like Westerberg with a guitar in front of a couple of mics, just going for it. Songs like that are not necessarily that complicated from a traditional music standpoint, but there’s something about the sound and the feeling and the rawness that is very appealing to me.”
This checks out. After all, if you put a frantic drum track behind ‘Answering Machine’, a few more layers of shoegaze-y guitars and a bunch of dudes six beers in going “woah-oh” at appropriate moments, you’d have a Japandroids song. Sure, neither band were quite as big as they could be. The records remain, though, and will continue changing lives for decades to come. That, for both bands, would be more than enough.
