If you’re wondering whether responded to ‘s, the answer is: kind of. Adam Granduciel didn’t call Mark Kozelek out by name, but he did knowingly mention the singer-songwriter’s letter to the band after their set-time run-in at Ottawa’s Folk Fest.
“Who played here last week?” Granduciel asked the crowd on Thursday. “Temples? Never heard of them,” he said with a knowing smile.
The reference went over most of the crowd’s head. The music, however, didn’t.
Aside from a minor sound difficulty in the beginning of the first song (“Burning”), it was smooth sailing throughout the band’s two-hour set. Though this was their second visit to Colorado in a handful of months, they made up the time in between with a shuffled setlist, including a few numbers they hadn’t busted out at their last performance at the Bluebird Theatre like “New Missles” and “Suffering,” which got more applause in advance than should ever be expected when that song title is announced. And let’s not forget the one-man horn section: a dedicated trumpet and saxophone player? the War On Drugs has officially arrived.
Like every classic rock band you love, the most memorable moment on the night was a cover. Grandciel knelt to his forbearers with an impressively memorized (and performed) rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue” for an encore, which had every War On Drugs fan who knew why they were there in a state of collective cult ecstasy, and the uninformed millennials wondering why they hadn’t picked “Wonderwall.”
You can’t win ’em all, Granduciel. But for the crowd at the Fox Theatre on Thursday, you’d have to be a grouchy motherf****r to write off the War On Drugs’ horn-filled, Dylan-nodding set of past blasters.
Follow our news and updates on , our relationship status on and our search history on . Or send us a telegram.
Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
Kirsten Cohen is a Boulder-based photographer and a new contributor to Reverb. See more of her work
