Walk this Way… “
The Walkmen managed to craft album after album of genuinely disarming and subtly contrasting
songs...seemingly from another dimension from the mainstream. BRAD BARRETT chats to Peter Bauer and Hamilton Leithauser about the New York/Philadelphia band’s new LP Lisbon.
It’s nice to have a distinct sound but I think we defi nitely try our best to change it,” says bassist and organist Peter Bauer. “Sometimes we’ll have a song that’s like “oh that sounds totally different” and you think it’s the newest thing in the world and then looking back, it’s very similar.” “It’s hard,” admits guitarist/vocalist Hamilton Leithauser. “Every time you write a song, you try to do that. You just get bored of the same thing. You can like the song but not like the approach, for instance. We struggled with writing a lot of rock songs in the past couple of years because we get so bored of it, of us all being so loud. But this time we sort of found a way to be fast and loud again but have a lighter touch.” The Walkmen’s fi fth album, Lisbon, has fi nally seen band’s fi nely woven, quieter moments receiving the appropriate accolades but what makes Lisbon such a concentrated jolt compared to the more laid back You & Me from 2008 though? “For us it was a seismic shift. Towards the end we worked with this guy called John Congleton,” explains Peter, talking of the frontman of incredible noiseniks The Paper Chase, who has also produced music from artists as diverse as Anthony and the Johnsons, The Roots and This Will Destroy You. “Everything was very stripped down, simple and had a very different quality to the stuff we were doing before which sounded more lush.” From the fi rst lazy notes of Juveniles, which
opens Lisbon, there is a melodic focus that is immediate while the iridescent haze of yore is implied through the notes and percussion rather than a sweltering clash of noises. “I think in the past we were a lot more detail orientated. Now it’s like if you don’t like it, we don’t try and brush up a track. You just throw it away. You either forget about it or go into another
room and do it again,” says Peter. “It doesn’t really work the same way twice. This time it was less the fi ve of us playing and wasting time together, which we did for years, and that was too many cooks in the kitchen and didn’t work out. So, once half the group had moved to Philadelphia, the actual time we spent together was more valuable and you spend less time just screwing around. We do things in these smaller groups now and it puts less pressure on each thing and you can come up with a lot more ideas and then, when it’s becoming a solid thing, it has a real fi ghting chance.” If separation and seizing time has resulted in this heightened melodic sense – and the band have never been slouches in this point, having written
exposed this time, freed from the tyranny of others expectations. So, this is where The Walkmen are: they now
have a new manager, a new label in Bella Union and blanket press positivity. Everything seems to have come together for this most unfortunate of bands. “I think we’re the last band you’d want advice from.” says Hamilton. “I can’t think of one good decision we’ve made. Get a good manager perhaps? The way we’ve run things over the last ten years have been shameful. Just comically bad. Our last manager said ‘You all don’t know how to run a business’ and then quit.” How a band who spent years “screwing around” and whose last manager washed his
“The way we’ve run things over the last ten years have been shameful… our last manager said ‘You don’t know how to run a business’ and then quit!”
plenty of memorable songs during the last decade, then it has also brought with it a new confi dence. No longer are eerie drones hiding beneath things or, as on a lot of Bows + Arrows, riding on top. Instead, the glassy Strimmer guitars sound more like fl ourishing harmonies than impatient noise. “It’s hard to genuinely like the songs,” says Hamilton, unprompted and honestly. “To the point where you work really hard cos you wanna like them and you know why you like the parts but at the end of the day you listen to the song and you think ‘I just don’t like that song’. You just don’t wanna hear it and it’s really frustrating because you spend so much time, months and months wasted. But in the end you have to keep trying new ways until you actually get to where you actually like it.” This point seems to have left the songs open and
hands of them managed to consistently produce albums of astounding quality since 2004 – and yes we include their cover of Harry Nilsson 1974 album Pussy Cats, which Hamilton says had “no thought” behind it and which he admits to not listening to since they made it in 2006 – well...we don’t really know. “I don’t think we have anything constructive to say,” says Hamilton, again undermining everything we know about The Walkmen, but perhaps hiding a lot that we don’t know. They may be short on words, but they aren’t short of expression and, let’s be honest, their forthright and honest answers are probably louder than most bands fl amboyant rhetoric. And that’s fair enough. Because, to unwillingly utilise an age-old cliché, the songs more than speak for themselves. PM
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