The Walkmen are the best rock ‘n’ roll band on the planet, plain and simple. Sorry to have to break it to you so bluntly, but how this group of Bob Dylan disciples has avoided consistent mainstream attention is a mystery to me. Riding high on a strong four-album run, the quintet possess all the tools required of a slick r-n-r machine: A guitarist with a splendid ear for melody, a bassist with near-perfect instincts, a keyboardist in the shadows, a vocalist with no shame, and a flexible, creative drummer.
The Walkmen are one of those bands, like Dylan, that don’t reach everyone. For me, that usually means I’ll try to Get It for years unsuccessfully, then suddenly BLAM-PLOP-FIZZ-SMASH, it crashes in my head like an errant crow planting beak-first into a windowpane.
Ouch.
This immediate immersion has, in the past, caused me to do unreasonable things. I still remember scrapping together cash to buy Mötley Crüe tapes from a neighborhood pawn shop, and I wasn’t gunning for just, say, Shout at the Devil or a “Home Sweet Home” single; I wanted everything they had to offer up to that point, and I made it happen (though I never did find the Toast of the Town/Stick to Your Guns EP, rare as it is).
Next came Metallica, and I moved with even more stealth, even more wrath until I had the coveted Kill ’Em/Lightning/Master/Garage Days/And Justice… quintet in my possession. And, let me tell you, I rocked out so hard and so often on my headset my family forgot I was around on family gatherings.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I was listening to a Walkman.
I won’t go into the depths of my Van Morrison jones too deeply; just know that, within a few months, I purchased/inherited the following records like downloading never existed: St. Dominic’s Preview, His Band and the Street Choir, It’s Too Late to Stop Now, Hard Nose the Highway, Moondance, Beautiful Vision, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, Veedon Fleece, Into the Music, Wavelength, Common One, and A Period of Transition.
So yes-yes-yes, I have an addictive personality when it comes to collecting certain artists. Strangely, this phenomenon normally only occurs with bands that I can’t stand upon first listen. I thought Mötley Crüe were evil when I first heard them, and back then, that wasn’t a compliment; ditto for Metallica. I figured Van Morrison was a one-hit-wonder for years upon years until I stumbled upon a $1 copy of the Tupelo Honey LP in an antique store.
I had a similar moment with The Walkmen. I found Hamilton Leithausen to be arrogant in the way he swung his voice around and wrung so much piss out of it, to the point where I often squirmed in my seat when “Little House of Savages” took its melody an octave higher halfway through.
I still wriggle when “Savages” goes next-level, but I’ve slowly realized that The Walkmen are much more than a stylish, stubbornly singular NY rock band with a singer that’s too confident for his own good. For one, drummer Matt Barrick has quietly carved the most distinctive percussive entity in indie-rock with his sense of subtlety, driving the songs with woodblocks, shakers, tambourines, hi-hat chicka-chicka, cymbal taps, and triangles. He never lets his drumset become an expensive trap, never lets the obvious thud of a bass drum suffice when a simpler pleasure could add something more personal, and never, ever, ever cuts corners, often holding several instruments at the same time and never looking too comfortable behind his set. And don’t worry: when it comes time to throw the-fuck down, he can do that too, as punk ragers like “Tenley-Town” attest.
Taken as I am with Barrick and his relentless push to revolutionize the way indie-rock songs are metered, he is but a part – albeit perhaps the most important part – of a machine that is eternally more than the sum of its cogs. Any Walkmen song sounds the way it does because of guitarist Paul Maroon; without him, Barrick would be slapping shiny decorations on a dying tree, and his ability to pluck out euphoric little stabs of electricity in between verses and choruses precludes the need for a true rhythm guitarist (though Leithauser straps a six string on occasionally). Peter Bauer is steady as they come on the bass, and though Walter Martin fills a less-defined, auxiliary roll, I can’t imagine The Walkmen’s splendid atmospheres burning so bright without his thoughtful, crafty, tinker-toy approach to his duties.
And, of course, any discussion of The Walkmen has to hinge on Leithauser, he being the out-front presence he is. Much has been made of his penchant for Dylanese, but however prone Leithauser is to imitating Dylan’s gurgles, it’s important to think about the last time you heard a Dylan impersonator that didn’t COMPLETELY miss the mark. When was it, “Sultans of Swing,” maybe? Yeah, that’s right – it’s literally been decades since anyone aped Dylan with any authority (Micah Hinson gets the silver medal, and the guy from Mendoza Line gets Honorable Mention), and no one wraps their lips around a song like Leithauser, who, like Dylan, has a way of crooning overtop the rhythm so haphazardly it’s as if he doesn’t even hear what the rest of the musicians are doing.
Another piece that makes the Walkmen puzzle so cohesive is their songwriting ability and the way it lends itself to different forms of expression. To cite the most recent example, You & Me, every song carries its own set of moods. Not a single song ‘rocks out’ in the traditional sense, yet every song is heavy in its own way. It’s a devastating album; what’s more, it’s The Walkmen’s fourth devastatingly good album of original material.
Thing is, you might not quite Get It until you see The Walkmen live; it’s what pushed me over the edge of fandom to rapture five years ago when, against my instincts, I skipped a Public Enemy show to see The Walkmen at Bumbershoot 2004 in Seattle. They played “What’s in It For Me” and “The Rat” in succession, as they are laid out on the album, and it was impossible to abstain from the feeling they wrung out of their devices. A subsequent trip to Seattle that same year cemented the relationship.
This time around, with two more albums to their name, the new cuts were hanging on the hook: “On the Water” starts with a ripple of urgency before exploding in red-alarm whistles and a frenzied tempo; the swingin’ “Donde Esta La Playa” (the first encore offering) slides casually along a downtown apartment’s hardwood floors in its socks, while “In the New Year” packs more power into its sudden bursts than a nuclear-powered jackhammer.
The true treat, however, is “I Lost You,” which is buried near the end of You & Me and contains a few of The Walkmens’ most memorable flourishes and an opening guitar sequence so lovely it sounds like it should have been crafted by an ace session musician in the ’70s.
Bring-down-the-lights numbers “Long Time Ahead of Us” and “New Country,” like “138th Street” and “No Christmas While I’m Talking” (which they played at the 2004 shows but not this time) before them, present us with the troubling possibility that The Walkmen would be just as effective as a stripped-down act, their awkward moments of solitude easily as important as the ‘whoosh’ moments that stand out upon first listen.
I could have gone without the horn section bleating in on the action so often, and “Little House of Savages,” an encore selection, didn’t shirk my irk once again.
Neither concern was an issue when the big picture is considered. As expected. The Walkmen roared out of the Bowery Ballroom’s imaginary gates with the same intent they seem to harness wherever they play, Leithauser taking his place front and center, forcing the crowd to not only hear him but to deal with him, one way or another. Sort of reminds me of a Walkmen album, actually; his squeals push you away before they draw you back in, and during performances, Leithauser takes an even more prominent role in projecting the group’s live energy, yelling and flapping his vocal cords for all they’re worth and hitting every note while not hitting every note, if you dig.
If you’re been snubbing The Walkmen, I don’t blame you, but it won’t be so easy to ignore them in the near future. It took U2 a half-dozen albums to truly break the surface; I’d be truly surprised if The Walkmen didn’t hit the number if they surge on for a few years. We can only hope we’re so lucky.