THE WALKMEN
A Hundred Miles Off
(part 1 of 2)
“Rod Stewart imitating Dylan, backed by Coldplay, all of them drunk,” was my wife’e estimate, just a little while ago, of singer Hamilton Leithauser and the aging boy-rockers who back him in this weirdo unit. She asked the name of the band. I said the Walkmen. She said where had she heard of them before? I said a few years ago our friend Tim had been lent their 2002 album Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone by Tom, a guy who was then a supervisor at the office where Tim and I work. Tim had liked the song “We’ve Been Had.” He’d passed that to me. I’d liked it too, and wound up putting it on the wedding CD Tim asked me to make when he and Stella got married.

“Ah,” said my wife. “This is their new album,” I said. “Yay,” she said. “You don’t like it?” I asked. She shook her head. “I’m thinking it’s -- interesting,” I said. “That’s better than boring.”

Then the phone rang, and I paused the CD. My wife handled the call. After that, I hit pause and the CD started up again. Something had changed. “Lost in Boston” was the song and it had a great careening, railing guitar part stretching it upward again and again at the same painful angle. There was a hurtle to the whole glittering mess, just a flashy, funny forward fly. I was loving that guitar and the desperate singer, his cry of existential blotto, and these clicked with elements I'd lifted to in the previous songs -- a fatal energy barely catching the edge of discipline in songs that had their own tight logic. I realized that maybe this was the rarest of rarities, the American indie band with a sound, an identity, a disgust for the solemn coexisting with a desire for the epic. The album was now, to my hearing, decisively wild and fabulous.

I told my wife that the Amazon reviewer had said Dylan backed by Joy Division -- a band she likes a lot. She said, “Yeah, a couple of those really did!” And then, referring to the music, “This has gotten a lot better.”

Another phone call. We’re on pause again.