Top 25 of 2008: #12 You & Me by the Walkmen

Image of the Walkmen courtesy of Tell All Your Friends PR

#12 You & Me by the Walkmen (Gigantic Music)

It's hard for me to articulate what draws me to the Walkmen - if you've read this blog at all, I'm sure you know that it's hard for me to articulate pretty much anything. The best way I can think of to describe it is that every Walkmen song brings to mind a single image - a group of exhausted, angry young men in the middle of an empty ballroom after everyone else has gone home, howling in impotent rage and not caring that their ties have come undone. The only variation in this image I get when I listen to their new album, You & Me, is that the ballroom is in Venice, Caracas, or Kowloon.

You & Me is a traveling record, but it's not really a "tour" record like some bands make. It's about wandering aimlessly - on "Seven Years of Holidays", Hamilton Leithauser sings, "I’ve traveled so far in my war, and I’ve lived in a suitcase for too long. Eugene, I’m lost!" And, even though the record is very much about travel, there's not really an "on the road" feel to it because the "room" is part of every song. The Walkmen love reverb, and they've gotten pretty good at using it in a way that creates a sense of space. The echoey sounds tell you that they're in a hall or a chamber or even a church - it's very organic in that way. So what you get is this sense of a band moving from room to room, city to city, country to country, wailing about wanting to go home. It's better than I'm making it sound, I think.

I picked up the first Walkmen record, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, when it came out, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't need another Walkmen record. The songs were not about "rooms" - at that time, they were more about "a room." The album gave the feel of a single space, and, although I liked it well enough, it was a little claustrophobic for me. They've released four albums since then, but You & Me was the first that differentiated itself enough to seem worth picking up (well, I have to admit that I'm going to pick up Pussy Cats, their song-for-song reproduction of the Nilsson record, at some point because I love novelty records). The claustrophobia is less of an issue now because of this sense of movement, and because of a smart palette of sounds - horns and piano are used to great effect, and the percussion is often a big component. Tambourine, sleigh bells, and woodblock pop up throughout the album, adding refreshing dynamics to the rhythm section.

"Four Provinces" is a favorite of mine from You & Me, and it starts with an anthemic riff and a tambourine flourish that lead in to a clattering flamenco rhythm. The song was apparently originally called "Hey, Leah" for obvious reasons. The phrase punctuates the choruses of the song - Leithauser spits the phrase out in his coarse yelping way, and the song build to what seems to be a lilting bridge before ending abruptly. The lights go out in the ballroom, and the Walkmen shamble off to their next locale.

"Four Provinces" by the Walkmen