Ugh. I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing. Only this time it was a different week. Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it. Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks. I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork. After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced. Anyway, here goes.
Posts Tagged The Walkmen
Sizable albino apes weaker than princesses; Los Campesinos! review
So the reason there was no review last night was because I had a marathon session of Super Smash Brawl with Ben and Rebecca, my first time playing that game, and it is a quantum leap from the first two incarnations, but some of the levels are really annoying and distracting, but that’s really my only gripe with the game.
…and THAT WAS THE FIRST AND LAST VIDEO GAME REVIEW BY IAMDC!!!!! CONFETTI!!!!!!
Okay.
Los Campesinos! is the name of an enthusiastic young Welsh(!) band – so enthusiastic that they put an exclamation point in their band name, which is also each member’s stage name; hence, Gareth Campesinos! is the lead singer, Aleksandra Campesinos! plays keyboards and also sings, and so forth. There are seven Campesinos!’s, meaning seven very young, very active Welsh kids jumping around and playing through popbescence, a term I just coined for music centered around youth and coming-of-age. Man, that would have been useful for the intro to my Walkmen review. Oh, well.
Los Campesinos!’ debut full-length, Hold On Now, Youngster… is what I imagine high school emo poets are really trying to say when they make poems about dead leaves and shit. Los Campesinos! sing about sexual frustration, trying desperately to impress the opposite sex, and just…fucking growing up, dude, you know? I’ve never heard music outside of Weird Al that relied so much on the lyrics to be appreciated fully. When I hear lyrics like “You should have built a statue, and so I did of you/And you were ungrateful, and slightly offended at the dimensions of it/You said you looked less like the Venus de Milo, and more like your mother in a straitjacket” in the song “We Are All Accelerated Readers”, that makes me sit up and take notice, and google song lyrics like they want me to. The main tragedy of this album for American listeners is Gareth’s intense Welsh accent which makes the lyrics kind of hard to understand if you a) aren’t watching him sing them (music videos help), or b) don’t look up the lyrics. By the by, I found lyrics for it here.
This album fascinates me, to be honest. I do sincerely regret not having listened to it a week earlier, so it could further put The Walkmen in perspective, but it mainly fascinates me because it seems so in the moment, so contemporary (two songs are titled “Knee Deep at ATP”, which is a series of music festivals, and “2007: The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)”), but feels like something that people are going to love for a long time, one of those albums that will be rediscovered and rediscovered with new mini-generations of young, awkward indie kids who can really connect with these lyrics on a visceral and intellectual level. I guess I get a feeling of importance from this record.
That being said, I don’t think it’s one of my top albums of the year so far, because of the paradox of necessary-to-the-music words that are hard to understand, as well as an abrasiveness that goes beyond intended levels because let’s be honest, these guys can’t sing very well. So that’s that for the review, but I want to post a few more snippets of song lyrics, because they’re really fun to read.
From “Knee Deep At ATP”
And though underexposed, i could see from the quality, his K Records t-shirt and you holding his hand
And I know he took you to the beach, I can tell from how you bite on your cheek, every time the sand falls from your insoles
And when our eyes meet, all that I can read, is “you’re the b-side”.
From “My Year In Lists”
You said “send me stationary to make me horny”
So I always write you letters in multicolours
Decorating envelopes for foreplay
Damn extended metaphors, I get carried away
From “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA, I’ve Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-romantics'”
The trails on your skin spoke more to me than the reams and reams of half finished novels you’d leave lying all over the place
And every quotation that’d dribble from your mouth like a final, fatal livejournal entry
I know
I am wrong
I am sorry
Dropping acid under the hood; Walkmen review
So when I originally planned to write the review, that title was what I first wrote, because I wanted my little “this is my life” paragraph to explain how when I got my car inspected, they found that my car battery was leaking acid inside the car, which sounds a lot worse than it is. But that’s really all I had to say about it; that and thank God my car is okay, I love everything about the way it drives, I just want to take its CD player outside and viciously murder it. But that’s that about that.
I’m overjoyed at how my contributors have stepped up their game of late. Their reviews, probably as a result of being less frequent, are overall better than mine, which I love. Feels like bringing in hired guns (and if you wish to see that analogy explored further, check out my own contributor bio over at BOTO). And I also know that this is probably a punctuated equilibrium thing, and that these runs will be the exception, not the rule, and I’m perfectly cool with that (but I do dare my contributors to prove me wrong). Still, if it gets me to step up my game, awesome.
This review was long-delayed, and I think it was because I wanted this review to be bigger than the album itself, because I think this jumped to my favorite album of the year basically the second time I listened to it all the way through and has only solidified itself as such since. I was just looking for an angle, and thanks to previewing it with Ben and Kriti, I think it’s well-developed enough to finally write about here.
I think that this album is important in balancing out this year in music. Up until this album’s release, the physical version of which will happen on August 19th (you can buy it digitally for 5 bucks that go to charity here! Do what I did and be a good person!), the great indie rock albums of the year, which in my opinion are: Devotion by Beach House, Red, Yellow & Blue by Born Ruffians, Visiter by The Dodo’s, Nouns by No Age, and Vampire Weekend’s self titled album, have all been youthful. When I say youthful, that can be applied in different ways; Born Ruffians is about teenage awkwardness and the love that is borne and hampered by it, Vampire Weekend is so college it just switched majors from “Being like by all the cool kids” to “Being dismissed, but still secretly liked, by all the cool kids”, Nouns is an album that glories in being undeveloped, ragged, and teenaged, The Dodo’s are just generally bright-eyed, and Beach House implies in both theme and the name of their band what they stand for – a summer vacation.
The Walkmen stand for none of these things on their newest album, You & Me. The one word that has stayed in my mind about it is mature. All of the albums mentioned above were either the first or second full-length from their band; this is the Walkmen’s fourth LP, fifth if you include their note-by-note cover of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Album Pussy Cats, titled Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen, and you can really hear how confident they are in their sound. In addition, all the above albums except for No Age were released in March or earlier, with Nouns coming out in May. The music industry had taken its yearly break for summer tours and festivals, and those of us who can’t blow hundreds of dollars one weekend for a music festival have been without something fresh for a while. So here comes You & Me, the perfect introduction to the second half of the music year, hopefully an indicator of things to come, in addition to showing us why child’s play is just that.
Beyond that, however, you can tell that this album is about adult love, not young love. And this isn’t even the adult love I talked to Kriti about, where you go on a first date, a second date, and you begin a relationship with having a relationship as the stated intent (as opposed to young love, where you see a girl in your chemistry class and you Chem Is Try to get her to make out with you). There’s both the “I’m still in love with you, after all these friggin’ long years” love (“On The Water”), the “we’re both older and without love, so what the hell” love (“Canadian Girl”), there’s the “I’ve spent so long being your friend that I’m fucking tired so I wish were in love” love (“Seven Years of Holidays”), and a different kind for every song. None of these loves are physical, except in “Red Moon”, where the “you’re beatiful” line still feels more like an emotional thing than lust.
This album really could be considered a concept album, in that I can imagine that every song here can be sung on some old riverboat going gently down the Mississippi River, just with different characters with different histories on each song. This goes beyond just maturity, it’s world-weariness that’s downright charming and enrapturing. I mean, all of these lyrics (and this is a mark of incredibly well-developed songwriting) could be just read as a poem and still be understood and appreciated. In “Postcards From Tiny Islands”, lead singer Hamilton Leithauser croons: “I’ll be drunk before too long/And I’ll keep up this sappy talk/This letter does it all/It’s too much to enclose/These postcards from tiny islands/do more than you know.” Leithauser is best known for having the most Dylan-esque voice around, if a little raspier and higher, but throughout the album he takes the similarities a bit further, adding Dylanesque sentimentality to his bag of tricks, while keeping the songwriting a little less verbose, a little more “read-between-the-lines”.
On a purely musical level, this album doesn’t really have any flaws, and isn’t all that ostentatious. The drums from Matt Barrick are totally solid, but not spectacular like on previous records, but that’s more than tolerable; this isn’t as drum-centric as 2004’s great Bows & Arrows was, but as Drowned in Sound, the only journalistic review I could find already published, says, “The musicianship is almost routine in its excellence; Matt Barrick’s drums in particular kick and roll throughout, propelling the songs with a sick-at-sea feel…”
The classic Walkmen sound is back, with lots of space in the music for echoes (not reverb) from the guitar and the cymbal crashes. But the difference here is that unlike previous albums, either with the keyboard in their first two or the brass band in A Hundred Miles Off, the four key rock components (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) are the only primary sounds on the album. A couple trumpet flourishes aside (most notably, and beautifully, in “Red Moon”), this is a self-contained effort, and I think the album benefits from it. These songs don’t need a keyboard to make them better; they’re great as is.
Individual highlights, while hard to pick out since really, every song is great, are probably these: “Red Moon”‘s slow, slow waltz is absolutely sublime, and “Canadian Girl”, which follows it, shows Leithauser channeling Motown with his “ahh-ah-ahh’s”, and flexing a bit of versatility. “On The Water” is the most aggressive song on the album, but it still manages to keep some benign influence to prevent it from being just another repeat of their breakthrough single “The Rat” from back in ’04.
Well, 2008, you don’t seem to be done cranking out the great music, but you’ve still got a lot of work to do if you want to surpass ’07. If TV On The Radio matures like the Walkmen have in their third effort, that should make it a lot easier.
A movie review will probably come tomorrow.