The Walkmen: You & Me

When I hijacked the indie credibility train to New York Town, I made sure to tighten my jeans and shrink my t-shirts. My skinny fucking arms and my patchy beard. After all, I was listening to Camper Van Morrison long before you bought your first DeCrotchKa cassette. Back then, there was this little band called The Walkmen, releasing album after album of pure sonic sustenance, Hawaiian reverb-soaked wedding ballad guitar vibrations and tinkering toy piano tones as fleeting as a cantankerous seaman’s cancerous semen-scented Hollywood afterthought. These Walkmen are all about the middle. Sure, highs and lows exist in their sonicsphere, but their albums revel in midrangey guitars and Leonard Cohen Brothers vocals that penetrate tympanic membranes and send synaptic signals bouncing around your bulbous brain until you want to bash it, ba shit against a wall, bleeding into your bro’s brew, bro-ham. It’s Dillonesque and I’m feeling a bit Gassian. Hamilton and company’s latest excursion into your hollow, opiate-caked heart is called You & Me, an apt title in a year when we have Hymn and Her and She & Him. Mysterious pronouns catch me off guard, like a contortionist with post-infectious IBS or a dangling disciple. But it’s the songs, man, the songs that matter. They meld together like a delicious swampy porridge in a crusty wooden bowl. It’s the subtleties that impress—the natural clicks of the keys and the scrapes of the strings, the nuance underlying an obscene October memory. Did you know that these former Jonathon Fire*Eaters and Recoys rockers received the inspiration for the chorus of their hit track “In the New Year” from Ridley Scott’s 2006 film A Good Year which stars Russell Crowe as a scrotum flicking neo-romantic? Break out your small sweaters boys ‘cause Autumn is upon us.

Editors Note: All misspellings, poor grammar, shoddy references, and unverifiable assertions are intentional. May Jesus bless this mess.