The Walkmen, Sculpted Again

There are a lot of reasons why I failed to listen to You & Me, the new album by The Walkmen, when it was released this summer. Most of those had nothing to do with The Walkmen at all and everything to do with the fact that I've drowned myself in a hot sea of black music. But to be frank, I had also lost a lot of the love I once had for the handsome New York-based quintet, its preppy clothes, its dylanesque post-punk.

I had become a fan from the first thing they ever put out, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002). This album worked on all the band's levels. The secret to The Walkmen's success is their chemistry as players and performers and on Everyone all of the sprawled paint of their animalistic live show is framed neatly in their minimal arrangements, which are intended to overpower with simplicity (...let's see how much effect we can get out bringing the bass in and out...). But what really made Everyone so special was that it was a studio album. It sounded tinkered with and sprinkled in crude ambient textures and hard-panned piano doodles. It was a one-of-a-kind sound, and maybe that's why the band figured it didn't need replicating. Fair enough.

But then they they became a touring beast, wrote a thunderous and fast song called The Rat which sounded like a man begging for his soul and which became the kind of song everybody wanted The Walkmen to be, and completely turned their backs on the studio-as-instrument, choosing instead to go for a band-in-a-room aesthetic that relied on natural room reverbs and tape saturation for character. The problem was that these recordings sounded increasingly unfussed over - but not in a good way. Bows + Arrows felt merely unloved, but A Hundred Miles Off sounded like it was recorded and mastered with a, well, Walkman.

The Walkmen were chasing a frustrating, elusive rock alchemy. The problem with music groups making band-in-a-room recordings is that they are usually self-defeating exercises. It's a condtradiction in terms. The process of studio recording itself - the clinical nature of it, the closeness of the walls and the lack of sweating bodies to bounce frequencies off of, not to mention the general abscene of white noise, generally results in recordings that don't faithfully replicate what the band sounds like live, or even in their practice space. But The Walkmen are a phenomenon in concert, and this deserves documentation and so, unfortunately, the alternative - a studio-manipulated album like Everyone - doesn't really seal the deal either.

I'm finally settling down with You & Me and I feel that this album is the best of both worlds. The recording quality is beautiful, with just enough additional instrumentation (the horn work, in particular is gorgeous) to make it sound "produced." But you would not be betrayed by seeing these numbers performed live - the album arrangements leave all the space of their live sets intact. The tempos are slow, but the band feels more comfortable in them. To me The Walkmen sound a bit forced as agro rockers and more natural playing expansive, ambient Americana; much of You & Me is the sound of tugboats, muddy southern rivers, fireflies and lemonade at dusk.

The Walkmen - "In The New Year" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen - "On the Water" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen "New Country" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen "Roll Down The Line" [From Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone]

The Walkmen "Stop Talking" [From Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone]

The Walkmen "What's In It For Me" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "My Old Man" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "No Christmas While I'm Talking" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "All Hands and the Cook" [From 100 Miles Off]