Thurs Feb 12, Chop Suey, 9 pm, $10.
After rising from the ashes of Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Recoys to release 2002's critically acclaimed Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, it seems nothing can stop New York band the Walkmen. Not even a string of disasters, natural and otherwise, crashing the recording of their recently released (and equally impressive) follow-up, Bows and Arrows.
Bookish frontman Hamilton Leithauser (the guy just finished reading Moby-Dick ferchristsakes) explains that the band's struggles against the elements began when they detoured from their usual practice space/recording studio in Harlem to work with engineer Stuart Sikes in Memphis. "We liked the [Memphis] studio a lot," he says, "but then a tornado ripped Memphis apart on our trip back down there. [Sikes] knew these guys in Mississippi so we just went to their studio instead." When the Walkmen returned to Memphis to finish Bows, they hit a citywide blackout that forced them to change plans a second time. An attempt to use a studio in New Jersey only landed them in another blackout. "By the time we got to New Jersey it really was just ridiculous," Leithauser says, laughing.
If there's a storm brewing within Bows, it's not one of brutish, tear-off-the-roof bombast, but rather one of well-controlled emotional outbursts. Leithauser steers the band across modern rock soundscapes weathered with gusts of singed-at-the-edges personal strife and stubborn romantic write-offs. (On "What's in It for Me," he quips to a fading lover, "You don't have to say it again, 'cause I heard you the first time.") Most of the sentiments in the Walkmen's songs seesaw in desperate confusion between making amends and severing ties, but no matter what he's attempting to convey, Leithauser is a consummate frontman, cementing the young Bono comparisons with every wavering, raspy note he emotes.
On Bows' surefire standout, "The Rat," Leithauser bellows passionately, "You've got a nerve to ask to be asking a favor, you've got a nerve to be calling my number. I know we've been through this before.... Can't you see me, I'm pounding in your door." As he burns through a rocky revelation, the band builds the instrumentation until the singer beats a slightly quieter retreat, adding the poignant lines, "When I used to go out I'd know everyone that I saw, now I go out alone if I go out at all."
"Hang on Siobhan," another star track, shackles the Walkmen's heavily textured sound by forcing everyone in the band--which includes organist Walter Martin, bassist Peter Bauer, guitarist Paul Maroon, and drummer Matt Barrick--to play at their quietest. "There's some old Appalachian Christmas song that has a similar melody, and we decided to try and do something similar to that," Leithauser says of this diversion from their usual style. "We [recorded it] live in Mississippi--just set up mics around the whole room. When you hear the song on headphones it really sounds like you're in the room because it's so quiet."
When they're not tiptoeing around delicate instrumentals, the Walkmen's songs float off the surface with the haunting sounds of Hammond and Vox Continental organs, vintage equipment that makes the tracks swirl in a mist of romantic antiquity around the clamor of broad, clanging guitar effects and the anchor of a steady drum beat. And that's to say nothing of the band's attraction to time-tested tools, of the Mellotron used and abandoned on Bows, or "a pump organ that nobody wanted," Leithauser says, "because it's six feet tall and weighs 400 pounds. We tried to use that but it never worked out right."
On the road, don't expect the Walkmen to skimp on the details that accent their songwriting so well. They travel with a piano to keep the authentic plinks and twinklings of the ivories woven into their songs. When asked how something as heavy as a piano travels, Leithauser makes the extra weight sound like a natural companion, explaining, "We've bought them in different strategic places around the country and in England and we leave them there so we can pick them up when we tour those places. And then we have one that just lives in the van."
