The Walkmen: You & Me (2008)

(Gigantic)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Seeing the Walkmen live for the first time last year and noting the way that they, as one of the very best bands in the world at going for the jugular, prefer to resist doing so, instead lingering and drifting around their melodic and emotional points, gave me a chance to reflect on how unusual their career trajectory thus far has been. The unfortunate portion is that it hasn't found them the widespread popularity that once seemed possible (they're still opening for bands like the Black Keys that aren't half as talented as they are); everything else about the Walkmen story so far is a model of how we wish these things always worked for young bands. Busting out with the '90s hangover of Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone and the massive impression-maker Bows and Arrows, the band proceeded to craft a world-weary, underrated road album with A Hundred Miles Off and then suddenly, in 2008, changed their entire direction. The nocturnal alienation band of 2000 had made a remarkably linear progression to cathartically joyful and deeply thoughtful music, more akin to Van Morrison than to their onetime "rock savior" peers.

You & Me, their fourth proper album, wrestles to my mind only with the subsequent Lisbon as their finest work to date; both are rare gems in the sense that they document a band's conscientious maturity without the usually accompanying retreat into adult-contemporary blandness. Lisbon is a refinement of this album's atypical sprawl and languid pacing, but there are days when the heartfelt mess of this recording is preferable to anything more carefully constructed. Disregarding what came later, the record is in any case a major departure, sweet-natured and achingly, almost overwhelmingly romantic. Better yet, it very distinctly comes across this way not because that's what their career points to as the next big score, but because it is a bald evocation of a mood, something being felt at the time; you can sense something in the room where it's been recorded, like you could with Please Please Me or even In Rainbows. It's magic, as weighty, rocking and direct as the National but as transportive as Galaxie 500.

It also illustrates an evolving sense of the real utility of music; the Walkmen had once been one of many New York City bands fighting for attention and meaning to strike out with their detached, tossed-off Richard Hell decadence. Even the slow songs, not unlike Interpol's, smacked of despair and the old punk rock trope of alienation. By now, after the audible frustrations of A Hundred Miles Off, it's not just warmth and love that seem to have overtaken the Walkmen -- it's an awareness of the power of memory. You & Me, despite its obvious thematic interests in shared lives and desires, would make a good companion to Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest, due to its concern with capturing how feelings far and near live on, vaguely or precisely, in the mind.

Like Lisbon, this record is among indie rock's most skillfully sequenced, formed into rather distinct thirds: a muddy and intense buildup, gradually collecting into the beautifully expressive midsection, and a hung-over denouement. The record also handily moves along from its predecessor; "Dónde Está La Play" is the opening mystery, and on it you can actually hear the spy-flick machismo of A Hundred Miles Off giving way to something eerily pretty, the slow takeover of a sound that has arguably now become the band's signature. Two songs later, it happens; we get "In the New Year," the first real explosion of this kind of unguarded feeling in the Walkmen's catalog. The enormity of the song's romance is bound to leave one familiar with "We've Been Had" and "The Rat" taken completely aback at first, then that stunner of a chorus gets under your skin and it becomes a large enough thing to be a brand new NYE tradition. In my house it is, anyway.

The Television comparisons that all NYC bands must wrestle with had always dogged the Walkmen, but they become something close to reality here. Musically, the Walkmen's recent work specifically reminds me of Television's masterful and underappreciated 1992 reunion album for Capitol (see especially "Postcards from Tiny Islands"), but in Hamilton Leithauser's vocals it's all Tom Verlaine circa 1977, especially in the sense of his sheer passion, kicking against apathy with inarticulate need; listen to how he's too excited to keep up with his own words on "Seven Years of Holidays." The endearingly ghostly backing whistles, well-sustained drama and build, and bass-heavy arrangement offer strong band interplay on "On the Water," but it's Leithauser's voice that makes it so irresistible and gives you such an unstoppable need to hear what's next.

Even at You & Me's occasional lackluster points -- which do exist; not all the fat got trimmed off this one -- you can still imagine yourself standing in front of the band and enjoying that certain total feeling of release. If the record overreaches a couple of times (see "Seven Years" and the slightly too on-the-nose "If Only It Were True"), it's because they're contending with a newfound force they've only just discovered themselves. These songs are more half-formed than the others, as though they can't resist trying to keep capturing that lightning with the same sort of base impulses; the drumrolls and kicks and devotion to playing the hell out of the songs never flag. As they conquer such shapelessness, the Walkmen are obviously the most assured and powerful they've ever been.

One reason is that the ballads here are as boisterous and explosive as the rock songs; the sheets of guitar falling over a wailing Hamilton on "Postcards" give such a dose of breathless excitement. And I keep harping on this, but we must note the "half moon and your pretty eye," the unabashed romance; among the 2000s' crop of major alt-rock bands, only TV on the Radio can do it better. This leads us into the Walkmen's biggest one-two punch to date. Trying to write about "Red Moon" is just ridiculous; it's a wedding song, right? Total slow-dance shit, and it's lovely when it begins but it just gets more and more so. The glorious horn section is set up against the reflective charm of just everything, and you're left with an otherworldly and painfully grand nominee for their best-ever track. "Darkness is wrapped all around me tonight," Leithauser sings, and we know what can save him; the song evokes no less than the Nat King Cole sequence in Terrence Malick's Badlands, when Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek start dancing in car headlights out in the desert. One can practically imagine Sheen's character putting a line like "you shine like the steel on my knife" in that song he wished he could've written.

"Canadian Girl" continues this unstoppable stretch with a touch of pop bliss and doo wop, the vocals actually conjuring up visions of Cole himself at points, with a wonderfully twisted and blurry guitar backing. This yet again, it must be said, is wedding music of the highest order, and any single element of it could stop you in your tracks, but the singing is what's most arresting of all, what makes it so hard to deal with its wondrously quick fade away. Between these two astounding cuts and "In the New Year" alone, this is one of the most heavily (but admirably controlled) cathartic and emotive LPs of recent years.

After the run of chamber pop in the center, "Four Provinces" is like a burst back out into open air. The poetry presses on, laid here against more percussive material, banging with lilting beauty up to the total release of the instrumental break, in the meantime giving Leithauser a chance to shout for something. The lost-nights moodiness and reflection go on after that; "Long Time Ahead of Us" is a campfire interlude of sorts that exemplifies the Walkmen's simultaneous pull in numerous directions, a crucial prelude to the top chorus of the album ("What happened to you??") on the essential "Rat" followup "The Blue Route." They're as great as ever at recording this kind of cut, always and forever their specialty, only now it seems more detailed and universal. Some old schoolers might even place "The Blue Route" above everything else here, but not me; I love the gushy stuff, and by the time the guitar and strings come on in the prior song it's like, agh, I'm yours, guys.

The final act of the record is marked largely by the beauty of the guitars. "New Country" just about lives in 'em, eschewing drums in favor of vocal meander a la some of R.E.M.'s stark Appalachian material on Green. The final surrender is in "I Lost You," the first touch of desperation here; the melody by itself is ominous, driven by a drunkenly beautiful and sad vocal and lyric, the sentiment unmistakably heartbreaking. What happened to you, indeed. It's in some ways a pity that so much genuine feel for devotion and cherished partnership across the LP must end in this kind of a stark goodbye, but part of the appeal of great albums about relationships from Pet Sounds to In Rainbows is they leave ample room to remain universal, even if you lose the special one. That's why we need this when we're alone. But we'll need it at our wedding too.

[SEE ALSO:]
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002)
Lisbon (2010)