5. The Walkmen - You & Me

For any listener who has been paying attention, the most engaging and fascinating aspect of the Walkmen's sound since debut Everyone who Pretended to Like Me is Gone has been their wintry, redolent ballads. But for so long, their music has been tempered, or rather characterized, by biting sarcasm and disdain, particularly from tour-de-force Bows + Arrows. A holiday of sorts then, found them playing around with Bob Dylan and Harry Nilsson's catalog; and the excursion seems to have excised much of that riotous excess in their mod-rock. We welcome them back on You & Me, sounding more comfortable and confident than ever.
Their music, always so effortlessly evocative, plays like a series of vivid postcards - a ruminative beach walk on opener Donde Esta La Playa, a subdued evening on a Latin Quarter balcony on Red Moon, a doorway exiting a cigarette smoke-filled bar on In the New Year. Every moment seems precisely orchestrated and nuanced; and in fact the album feels thematically stronger than any past Walkmen record. They may have written some of rock's finest singles this decade but there's an earnest desire for You & Me to be taken seriously and attentively as an album. Details, cautious as they come, are what engage and reward, like lambent beams emanating from the swirling clouds conjured by The Walkmen's trademark tones - cavernous reverb, vintage piano, and playful percussion - from the shimmering keyboard and reedy whistling on On the Water to the sepia-drenched organ mood on Long Time Ahead of Us. In fact, the most signifacant manifestation of this clarity is in Leithauser's vocals - one can actually make out his words now, aside from hearing his temples bulging.
And it's a blessing, for You & Me is all about growing up. The Walkmen have moved on from the heady after-party days of Bows + Arrow, and the apathy and outright hatred that previous songs were steeped in have given way to acceptance, weariness and regret. "Tomorrow the sun will be brighter / the water will rise and wash us away," he muses on the gorgeous Red Moon, amidst a grandoise brass section and poignant acoustic guitar. It's the perfect distillation of the new Walkmen - deliberate and self-assured, engaging and introspective, sweetly sombre and coyly graceful (or perhaps sombrely sweet and gracefully coy), yet most of all still refreshingly sincere and original.

talk.

silence from you is like the death of a tune

links

ctrl + left click

archive

the law of dreams is to keep moving

misc

so goes the backing track of all the sighs we ever sighed