(Fat Possum)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Ask me point blank and I'll tell you that if you're a rock band, you have to be pretty sure of yourself -- and your audience -- to get away with actually naming something on your album "Torch Song." Were such a thing to occur, I might've assumed it would be some ironic gesture. Think of Devo mocking Rush or some such smug theatrical game. Visions of humanist sincerity surely wouldn't approach. That's because I very much doubt I'd take the Walkmen into account: who the Walkmen are, what their songs are, what they as a band have already proven they can do.
This is what a song like the meditative, person-to-person dispatch "Torch Song" by the Walkmen does: it regroups and even recasts reality, which is a keen trick in the distorted world of 2010, perhaps even more than it was three years ago when Radiohead did the same with the clear-eyed lovelorn delicacy of In Rainbows. Accidentally or on purpose (which doesn't matter), these bands both demolish preconceptions that reach far beyond their station: preconceptions about what purpose a rock band serves and who their listeners are. They demolish the notion of the pretentious hipster everyone complains about. This music levels the playing field to pure emotion, beautifully and subtly expressed; it is up to others to make class-conscious judgments about its appeal. And what a wasteful, dumb thing to do to something so wonderful. The opening song offers the truce: "Country air is good for me, no matter whose side I'm on." And appropriately, "Juveniles" feels like open space, the celebratory despair of the Faces' "Ooh La La" with chiming guitars.
The short version of this review is, you will love this record. Love it. You will take it with you where you go and you will cherish how its sounds collide with and fall over the things you see and the events you live through. Born of someone else's life, it becomes a product of your own. That's what this stuff is for.
The Walkmen are a band from New York City or Washington, depending on who and when you ask. If you're not a fan, you've still probably heard their songs "We've Been Had" and "The Rat." It really doesn't matter whether you have any of their prior albums yet; missing them isn't an affront to enjoying this one, but for the record, all four are excellent, though most folks seem to disagree with me about their third, A Hundred Miles Off. Comparatively speaking, after the youthful zest and hard-hitting immediacy of their earliest records, this one is a refinement and even a cooling down of the intimate, complex 2008 release You and Me. As with You and Me, its beauty is most likely to unfold gradually, repeated listens almost a narrative in themselves.
The noise of a gently propulsive rock band recording excellently crafted songs like these should be enough. If we must describe the sound and themes, well, the Walkmen are about adulthood and loss, as always. They are also about atmosphere, about New York, about the foggy sound of night streets and darkened alleyways existing mostly in hazy memory or dreams. Interpol and the National fit these profiles as well, but Interpol has failed to grow with the Walkmen, and the National take a harder-line, real-world approach where the Walkmen stand and ponder. Those wavering, tirelessly pretty guitars make it easy to conjure up images of the Jesus & Mary Chain or even the Cocteau Twins. But the Walkmen look over the horizon to even mistier peaks: they often bring to mind Television at their most romantic and quiet. On this album there is an even stronger classisist streak. Vocalist Hamilton Leithauster has always sounded a bit like (particularly latter day) Bob Dylan. But now the songs push him higher, higher than he can even reach, so that his voice frequently breaks charmingly over a Van Morrison-like crescendo. The tunes and their structures feel occasionally like heavily revised and tampered-with doo wop, legacies of a nearly unremembered time. Most of all, the Walkmen share with Television, Morrison, and earliest R&B a near-complete subservience to emotion, to the point that the band seems to long so much to express something that the songs threaten to collapse as an afterthought. They never do, of course, but the music has that wonderful drunken feeling of inarticulate elation and (as often) sorrow.
Happily, the songs that feel most like throwbacks here are as fresh and confident as the rest. "Blue as Your Blood" signals a widely-heralded debt to the country & western sound of the early Sun Records, tempered by the lushness of their NYC guitar jangle; the song's ample charm comes from this fusion and its rhythmic momentum. Though not quite so infectious, "All My Great Designs" is even stronger -- its murky, Verlaine-like guitar hook builds to a beautiful wall of vocals at the midpoint; no Interpol detachment or resistance to a climax here. And as brilliant as High Violet's endless tension is, it's a relief to hear songs that lead to such massive emotional payoffs.
Those yearning for the classic Walkmen sound that You and Me skimped on a bit will be delighted with the passionate, melodic explosion of "Angela Surf City," which still manages to integrate the off-kilter guitar tornados of the 1980s indie that seems to provide so much of this album's sonic framework. It leads on to the one track I'm slightly dubious about, the noisy "Follow the Leader," which might fit elsewhere in the Walkmen catalog but feels like an afterthought here, such that it seems no wonder they get over with it quickly (2:01).
The album's two larger-than-life anthems feel like a new exploration for the band. "Woe Is Me" is breakup blather turned into a confrontation, a lonely missive against the world -- the chorus as powerful, communicative, perversely joyful as any I've heard all year. "Victory," meanwhile, is something unique: a baroque waltz that becomes a pounding, assured celebration, even it equipped with some of that trademark Walkmen trepidation, but always the kind of looming doubt that comes with a smirk. These victories are fleeting but life goes on.
No doubt, the first half of Lisbon strikes faster than the second, but not deeper. The first time you listen to the album, you might even fail to notice the depth and strength of its two beautiful closing tracks, but try again and concentrate more and you feel the world swim away and you with it. "While I Shovel the Snow" stunningly captures the Walkmen pensively exploring an empty feeling in a winter landscape, its guitars and melody a masterfully evocative slow-burn. If it's the album's strongest ballad, the title track must be its most simply gorgeous. Slow, bent, inspiring, lovingly crafted, it is a simultaneous love letter and lament to solitude, the minimal, lyrical chirping of the guitar wrapping around Leithauser's lonely, trudging vocal. It's overwhelmingly sad, blissfully alive.
But on reflection, I think the peak of the record might be the song that clearly is designed to stand out the most -- which, indeed, is the only reason I hesitate to declare it such. "Stranded" feels like New York Beirut, or a Van Morrison funeral march. Phenomenally mournful brass rings out as Leithauser gets lost in the blues, more explicit than ever but also here at their most muscular and forcefully pretty. Depression has seldom seemed so triumphant. The song plants itself in us because it is so well-written and magnificently played it may as well have always existed. It's nothing new, these feelings, we're just discovering them. I mean, fuck the idea that this isn't universal music for everyone; it might not be, but is there any reason for it not to try? And that purity of expression is something to strive for, something I'm thrilled the Walkmen find as important as I do.
And some people actually think rock & roll is dead. If it is, this must be heaven.
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