War On Drugs :: "Come To The City"

It was a traveling song, an idea, or maybe a notion of space that caused four Irishmen to write one of the best records of their generation. This is surely the beginning of a hackneyed comparison to U2, and their wide-eyed, neo-Tocqueville trip through the American landscape, but War On Drugs latest single, "Come To The City" follows similar paths to the ones Bono found in an American national park just a few hours drive east of Los Angeles. "Come To The City" even features an unmistakeably Bono-style yelp at the 1.45 mark, but the hook just precedes this eruption, a candid lyrical motif,  "I've been rambling", with the last word later interchanged for "moving", "drifting" as the band tries on different valencies of the same idea. An admission without being an apology, War On Drugs drive at the root of this wanderlust, the kind of thing every American reasons through at one moment or another: This place is just so damn big, how can you expect us to narrow, to focus, to turn down our ambition? Bono saw the problem from the outside in, but War On Drugs wrestle with it inside, where issues of space magnify and escape is illusory.