Guess who just rolled back into town on the last Greyhound of the day? Yup - New Yorican indie-beatnik mavericks The Walkmen, back from a long jag on the freight trains with a new album, You & Me. You’d be forgiven for not realising they’d gone anywhere, because they’ve never had the most massive public profile, and with the best will in the world You & Me is unlikely to change that too significantly. This is not flavour-of-the-month music… but that’s not to say it’s without merit.
“Donde Esta La Playa” opens the album with a slow ebb and rumble of drums and the words “well, it’s back to the battle today / but I wouldn’t have it any other way”, but the languid Dylanesque resignation of frontman Hamilton Leithauser’s delivery belies the enthusiasm implied by the lyrics. You & Me keeps to this mournful folksy vibe for the bulk of its running time, refusing to get itself wound up.
It’s certainly a stark contrast to the jangling rage of “The Rat” from previous album Bows & Arrows, but that’s no bad thing from where I’m sat. The Walkmen seem more content with their lot this time around, willing to build slowly to measured and clangorous drones of noisy jangled guitar and haunted-house organ with a spaghetti-western sense of wide-open space and hard times on the dusty trail, no more perfectly captured than by the shrill whistled melody at the end of “On The Water”.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading him recently, but You & Me sounds like the sort of thing that might soundtrack Kerouac’s early novels, if you were to film them re-couched into a more modern milieu; The Walkmen have conjured up that on-the-road sense of turning one’s back on the straight world for a lifetime of wandering from town to town and story to story. And while they still share a sonic connection to the NYC hipster-indie sound that The Strokes made into a bankrollable (and ultimately boring) product, there’s none of the preening vanity of Hammond and company here.
Again I’m reminded of Dylan - not just by Leithauser’s ragged wailing vocals, but by the spacious simplicity of the songs, the melancholy introspection, the acceptance of tough times and good times alike. It may not be to everyone’s taste - I’m not even sure it’s entirely to my own - but what is plain is that it is to The Walkmen’s taste. You & Me is the sound of a band who have found their true voice, the one that they don’t have to force.
Or perhaps they’re just trying very hard to not seem like they’re trying to hard, if you catch my drift. If that’s the case, it’s very subtly done; You & Me is like a huge sonic shrug, its nonchalance speaking silent volumes between the lines. Is this what happens when a band stop trying to please anyone other than themselves? I guess only The Walkmen themselves could answer that question directly, but in a way the album is all the answer you need.
It’s unlike almost anything I listen to with any regularity, and furthermore it’s unlike anything else I’ve heard anyone playing in a long long time. Maybe that’s what makes it so compelling - I sense there’s much more for me yet to discover in You & Me’s fourteen tracks, and The Walkmen should perhaps consider making an album upon which one cannot pass an immediate judgement to be a triumph made all the more sweet by its rarity.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Americana, folk, indie, post-punk, rock, The Walkmen, You & Me
