This live album, recorded in 2017 at the venerated Toronto concert hall, shows the duo sounding reliable and downright professional. The wild utopian energy that characterizes their albums and their best performances is missing.
Right before launching into his set closer on Massey Fucking Hall, Japandroids frontman Brian King takes a moment to thank “you guys up front... [for] making us feel a little bit more like it’s a normal Japandroids show.” Up until this, he and David Prowse had been playing the most not-normal Japandroids show in history. The duo were facing a larger crowd than any they’d seen from the second leg of 2017’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life tour, in their nation’s most venerated concert hall, less than a week after the death of Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, the People’s Champ of Canadian rock. What followed King’s nervous aside is the most normal thing to happen at a Japandroids show: they end with “The House That Heaven Built,” a song that King has admitted he cannot sing for the life of him.
Even Japandroids’ most evangelical fans know that King and David Prowse can’t really pull of most of their vocals live; those “whoa”s and “yeah”s don’t quite hit the same when it’s really two guys doing it, as opposed to two guys overdubbed to sound like 250. Japandroids were capable of live transcendence, but only if they weren’t completely trashed by the time they got on stage or at a point during their marathon tours where King has inevitably blown out his voice. Their reputation as hard-drinkin’, hard-rockin’, hard-lovin’ punk vagabonds ran up against their reality as a couple of studio perfectionists, and Massey Fucking Hall lays this dissonance bare.
The live album reveals a Japandroids that became reliable, downright professional. Or at least practical—here, “Younger Us” truly sounds like it’s being sung by someone older and wiser; “Fire’s Highway” steps off the gas to avoid the daredevil melodic bridge jump of its chorus, staying safely in the carpool lane. The chorus of a Japandroids song is written to be yelled like hell to the heavens while surrounded by hundreds of people who will drown you out. But those people didn’t have to do it all over again two nights later, like King did, and you could hear those calculations creep inevitably into their playing.
The Post-Nothing cuts fare best; they had fewer moving parts and thus didn’t suffer from being played sloppily or off-key. King riffs on the Stooges’ “1970” at the top of “Heart Sweats,” recasting one of their least-essential album cuts into the lineage of brilliantly braindead rock, while “Sovereignty” still thrums on the desperate days when they couldn’t draw a dozen people outside of Vancouver.
The songs on Near to the Wild Heart of Life began to integrate the sort of things that make songs work in 3000-capacity venues—slower tempos, synthesizers, backing vocals and lyrics about the road that were based in reality—but if they added new personnel on stage or had a stage setup that distracted from King’s three amp stacks, they wouldn’t be Japandroids anymore. The steamrolling momentum of setlist highlight “Arc of Bar” redeems the surrealist hokum of King’s most divisive song, but even if you could watch it set to Japandroids’ modest light show, it still can’t quite compete with the Be Here Now-level excess conjured by the studio version.
Despite its flaws, Massey Fucking Hall serves a monument for a band whose vision of non-toxic masculinity remains utopian and inspiring. It’s a world full of wild urges, but also one in which romantic fulfillment serves as the highest form of self-actualization (see: “Continuous Thunder,” “No Known Drink or Drug”). Massey Fucking Hall documents thousands of people bearing witness to two unpretentious guys playing unfashionable rock songs about ordinary people willing to push themselves to extraordinary places in their relationships. If Massey Fucking Hall underwhelms, it ironically functions as the greatest possible endorsement to see Japandroids in person, if that opportunity ever exists again.
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