(Record Collection)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Shortly after I returned to Heaven to deliver an updated verdict on it, my longtime friend Brian texted me to inform me he'd just discovered the album and had flipped for it, calling it the Walkmen's best since Bows and Arrows. I must admit that it has its melodic tangents that have stuck with me strongly in the last few days, and my impression of it has improved since its initial release, but what struck me about Brian's comment was how differently his impressions of the Walkmen are from mine. For I have felt that their career was leading to the double-header of You & Me and Lisbon, a peak of unfiltered, masterful rock & roll beauty. Though Bows + Arrows had been my introduction to the band -- and, indeed, to modern indie rock -- I suddenly realized that I hadn't spent any significant amount of time with it in several years.
The Walkmen have always adored linguistic clichés. "What happened to you?" "We're counting on you." "What's in it for me?" "We can't be beat." "Woe is me." They're something that creates an instant rapport, something to toy with, but in my mind all these years the band had only begun to concentrate on a give-and-take audience relationship in the hopeful, open-armed sounds they delivered in the late 2000s. It's not that I'd forgotten the romantic reveal on "What's in It for Me?" but just that it had lingered in my memory as something else, something detached and closed-off and brooding. With the perspective of the intervening years, though, I now see that everything goes back to Bows + Arrows, that it's no outlier at all -- it's just a youthful expression of the same emotions that would end up delivering the band's best recordings. Youth provides, of course, a climactic heft that an older band could never manage, which is one reason why this remains their signature record in the eyes and ears of most folks. But they're already suggesting sweet domesticity on the tirelessly pretty "138th Street": "take a wife and start a life, it won't be long."
I discovered the Walkmen in the very 2004 manner of a burned CDR from a fellow deli clerk, at a time when my awareness of new music had reached what remains its all-time nadir. The radio was gone and I had not yet adjusted to the methods of discovery and digestion that would soon fill the years between Napster and Spotify. Dustin, the friend who made me the CD, was consumed and validated by "The Rat," as I soon would be. There are other slamming "rock" songs on this actually quite sad and quiet album, which contribute to its legend and memory as a brash and attitude-filled production hunting undeniably for Strokes-ish immediacy, but even they shimmer ("The North Pole") or scatter ("Thinking of a Dream," which boasts both consuming organ and an American Breed drumbeat cop). The touchstone here, I knew immediately, was Marquee Moon, a record I unreservedly adored and found infinite solace in at that time -- so I responded well to Bows + Arrows, but to none of it so much as "The Rat," which entirely orients and balances the remainder of the LP. It was like some sort of knock down into a puddle, and I still believe it to be the finest rock song of its decade.
Because you can hear the future and the past in the pure hazy distortion of "No Christmas While I'm Talking," the drunkenness of "My Old Man," but it's no big thing to express youthful introspection in those terms. "The Rat" is a remarkable single because it delivers apprehension and alienation as a violent and desolate force without either anger or self-pity; it's a black hole of something akin to empathy, so even as it sounds nothing like Television, who'd have balked at the idea of providing such a forgiving climax, it does their thematic concerns proud. The harshness of its rapid-fire assault, the strangely redemptive arrangement, the half-hearted expressions of broken longing that almost but not quite can be bothered to get upset ("I know, we've been through this before") are all aspects of its primal appeal.
But the thing Dustin and I obssessed over, at a time when every other piece of music we conversed about dated from the early '80s at the latest, was the bridge, which musically is just a mild break from the catharsis, but vocally and lyrically, Hamilton Leithauser delivers the haunting thesis: "When I used to go out I would know everyone that I saw. Now I go out alone, if I go out at all." I was twenty then, and without knowing what the future would hold, I somehow knew this was a universal biography of my kind. As much as "Venus" and "Marquee Moon" might have celebrated the dizzy familiarity of a city, "The Rat" sees dread and despair in the same -- yet there's still a hint of beauty and joy to be found, but it's an Eyes Wide Shut or Sweet Smell of Success New York, not a Woody Allen New York. This ain't the Mudd Club or CBGB's; I ain't got time for that now.
"The Rat" is only the second cut on Bows + Arrows. I think it was months before I stopped repeating it long enough to move on. I eventually found much to love in the oblique beauty of the title track, the hungover piano of "Hang On, Siobhan," in which Hamilton's ache predicts his next eight years of gorgeous singing ("we promised to keep it between you and me," he snarls adoringly). And while it's handily defeated by "In the New Year" in the grand context of Walkmen songs about December 31, "New Year's Eve" is a simple, gorgeous jewel, the occasional explosion of joy already driving the Walkmen. That's certainly illustrated by the other climactic track here, the immortal "Little House of Savages," which when I put it on yesterday evening drove home to me how much, as good as Heaven is, it can't stand up to this relentless, brutal younger band. After all these years I can't decide if the narrative of someone waiting for you to come home is as romantic as my heart tells me or as menacing and potentially lethal as my cynical impulse does, but the best corroborative evidence that it's both -- a doomed love affair, more than likely -- is the almost conservative romanticism and pragmatic intelligence illustrated by the three most recent Walkmen records. And that's what I love about them, what I suspect I was hearing from the start. Because it's scary and sad, and you're a bastard for doing this, but there's also some resigned what-a-world loveliness to all of it, isn't there?
I was a Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry geek; the only currently running band I cared about in 2004 was Yo La Tengo, and really I was more interested in movies then anyway. "Little House of Savages" would have more relevance for me than I could've known later in the year, and years hence so would that haunting refrain in "The Rat," but what hooked me was that this was a rock band from New York City (by way of Washington) and they were alive, new that moment, and here I was receiving these missives and caring about, loving them. (I could have seen them at a tiny club called the Soapbox that very week -- more foreshadowing -- but didn't, because I was too scared to go out on my own; I wouldn't get to see them until six years later, but it was worth the wait.) It was a moment of genuine evolution and stabbed much of my skepticism about "new bands" in the heart. I couldn't really explain why this sound connected so instantly and intimately with me, why I heard the wet city streets of Marquee Moon in the Walkmen's songs, don't know why they sound like they should be bigger than life to me and aren't (they still open for younger, lesser bands after all these years), but whatever. It's to my delight that it's all still true, that I'd forgotten how it was all already there back then. As the song goes, the more we talk, the less we understand.
[SEE ALSO:]
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2004)
You & Me (2008)
Lisbon (2010)
Heaven (2012)
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