Young Hearts Spark Fire: 5 Songs of Celebration Rock

This week's songs are from Japandroids, Bob Mould, the Hold Steady, Home Front, and Dogleg

Sub-genres are fun. A few weeks ago, I made the case for Enshittification to be its own sub-genre of punk. Mainly because it’s a nice exercise in classifying things—the identification of a trend. Naming it. Validating it. Looking at other things through that lens to compare and contrast.

A favorite sub-genre is Celebration Rock. Named after the 2012 Japandroids album—the band that best encapsulates everything that is Celebration Rock—it’s almost self-explanatory.

It’s loud. It’s fast. There may be some shouting along. But it’s not angry. In fact, it’s full of joy. There are big choruses with passionate statements that contain more cheese than your average Kraft Single. It’s indulgent, often in every sense of the word. Shout along; define yourself in absolutes; throw that beer in the air. Celebrate the present moment. It’s music that occupies the center of a Venn diagram of Bruce Springsteen and Hüsker Dü; a Meadowlands show on a Stone Pony budget.

In the early 2000s, Indie Rock leaned into the Indie and nearly gave up guitars altogether. There’s a time and a place for ultra-serious art/noise, and synth pop, and anything else that floats your boat. This created an opening for some good-natured, well-meaning bros with Marshall amps and a disregard for volume knobs to remind us all that sometimes rock is also meant to be loud, ridiculous, and played with abandon.

“There’s a difference between people who are born with that special thing and people who love the people who are born with that special thing so much that they want to try their best to get as close as they can to it.” - Brian King

Japandroids - “The House That Heaven Built”

Obvious choice, yes. But it would be rock & roll heresy to leave Japandroids off this list, since they perfected the form: sing earnest lyrics with shout-along choruses at an unhinged speed and deafening volume. Better yet, bring Springsteen-level energy to your live show, which will mostly be in tiny rooms. Singer/guitarist Brian King, as noted in the above quote, felt his passion for the energy of rock & roll was much bigger than his musical abilities. But as Cubs great Andre Dawson said in his Baseball Hall of Fame induction speech, “if you love the game, it will love you back.” The energy in “The House That Heaven Built” is relentless, raucous, infectious joy. It’s a joy delivered with unabashed sincerity (itself a rare thing that is also terribly uncool, which of course what makes it so rare) at a pace and volume that demands that joy be spread, shared, reveled in. And there’s a message for anyone that gets in the way of it: “tell ‘em all to go to hell.”

“It’s very spontaneous. It’s very simple…It sounds right. It feels right. So it’s a lot rougher record. The last few records, especially ‘Life and Times,’ they very were studied records. This one was just flying off the speakers. As soon as you put it on it just starts coming off the edge of the speakers.” - Bob Mould

Bob Mould - “the Descent”

Hüsker Dü, Sugar, and a respectable solo career. I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Bob Mould, but I just can’t really break into a lot of his music. What I do like I really like, but that’s just a handful of songs and I can never really go that deep. If you were to ask me why, I’d say something about the metallic, relentlessness of his guitar sound and the over-annunciation of his voice. But both of those things are what help make “the Descent” so much fun. The extra wallop in the song, and really all of Silver Age is the rhythm section Mould brought in: Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster (Superchunk, the Mountain Goats). He’s toured and recorded with them ever since. But the album was something of a return to form with a power trio, and something more altogether, as Mould evolved into a warmer, less serious person. Personal work, digging through his past to write a memoir, and working and touring with the Foo Fighters revitalized Mould, and Silver Age was something that came quickly for him. He would go on to release Sunshine Rock in 2019, more consciously written with positivity in mind.

“At a certain age you get above 27 and if you’re still into that there’s something kind of wrong. I just wanted to do something that people who buy records at Target in the middle of Kansas who’ve never heard of Pavement or another indie band would be able to relate to.” - Craig Finn

The Hold Steady - “Heavy Covenant”

9 out of 10 Hold Steady songs could qualify for this list. One of the great “bar bands” of its generation released an album called Stay Positive after all. Earnest, celebratory rock & roll. Legendarily raucous live shows where literary-minded dudes could bro-down, slam beers like their cousins who haven’t read a book since high school. Singer Craig Finn holds court over a killer band, where the songs feel more like he’s regaling the crowd with fun stories about his deadbeat friends from back home. Like Japandroids, the Hold Steady were a reminder throughout the 2000s and 2010s indie rock scene that music can be fun, and that fun music can also be smart. Boys & Girls in America is a Celebration Rock masterpiece. But the relentless grind of touring and keeping up the formula fractured the band for a while. What happens when the celebration starts to feel forced?

Keyboardist Franz Nicolay felt it was getting that way and left the band for a few albums, before returning in 2019. On “Heavy Covenant” from 2021’s Open Door Policy, Nicolay and producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, the National, Muzz) combines two separate ideas Nicolay was working with into a single stomping jam that breaks open the chorus with a horn section instead of “Whooaahs!” And instead of singing about broken relationships and the excesses of youth, it’s budget business trips and rearranging plans on a smartphone; the most pedestrian of things. So why am I bouncing my head and throwing up my fist with the beat?

“Playing these songs every night and hearing the recorded versions, they’re so different to me. Maybe it’s just because I’m standing on stage and hearing whatever in-house mix is going through the monitors, but sometimes it’ll be so chaotic that there’s elements that I love about the band, and there are elements that I think, I wish we had that on the record.” - Grant Mackinnon

Home Front - “Light Sleeper”

Home Front’s Watch it Die came out just a few weeks ago. The Edmonton duo is synth pop with hardcore energy, or hardcore with synth pop instrumentation—choose your own adventure! “Light Sleeper” has the energy, attitude, and big sing-along chorus to qualify as Celebration Rock. If only because what better way to deliver a chorus like “We’re born alone, we die alone” than as anthemic gang vocals. Grammatically, it’s a contradiction, so why shouldn’t “we” acknowledge that by shouting along together, appreciating the time in between with vigor.

“I’m thinking about all the bands I used to listen to that mean a lot to me, and I wasn’t spending lots of money on them. But they still meant a lot to me because I was listening to them for my entire life basically, and that means more, because you connect to it on a deeper emotional level. And I want that for us.” - Alex Stoitsiadis

Dogleg - “Bueno”

I’m not one to grab onto my high school years as this amazing time that I constantly want to relive, or to surround myself with the music and movies from that period of my life. They may have resonated then, but much of it no longer does. Some of what did is dated, a lot of it is pretty embarrassing, but people grow, right? There’s more to pick at here, but that’s for another 5, 10…ok, maybe 50 songs. What I’m getting at here is there’s something I’ll hear now as an adult and enjoy, but deep down there’s 15 year-old-me who loves it. Even as people grow, that version of you is still in there somewhere.

At it’s core, Celebration Rock is about tapping that teenager inside you, feeding energy and unabashed sincerity to its undeveloped prefrontal cortex; giving it permission to feel the big feelings, jump around, and shout along to the lyrics so you can feel connected to the people around you without having to talk to them.

15 year-old-me loves Dogleg. Propulsive energy, massive drums, bigger choruses with lots of shouting, but never lacking in melody. It reminds me of fellow Michiganders Small Brown Bike, if a little bit more commercially-minded. “Bueno” is an adrenaline rush of a song that seems to zig and zag without ever losing it’s insane momentum. Like turning a corner in a car without tapping on the break, it propels forward a little faster with each change in direction. The lyrics could be about getting the wrong order from a drive-thru for all I care, but 15 year-old me will shout along as if my life depended on it.