The Walkmen - You & Me (Fierce Panda)
4/5
There's a common shibboleth within popular music claiming that digital media and its attendant culture will eventually signal the death of the album format. It's an assessment not without some cogency either, given the proliferation of MP3 blogs and file-sharing services which thrive on a soundbite culture. Prominent acts like Muse and Ash have been quick to add fuel to the fire, stating their intentions to dispense with long players in favour of the release of a series of singles. The music industry is changing, the line of best fit indeterminately shifting, but really, it's all guesswork. What this essentially distils to, rather depressingly, is art in the service of commerce, music made to match market demands. The message is clear: adapt or die. But just like the Jay Z doubters, some people just didn't get the memo.
Recent albums from Foals, TV On The Radio, Bloc Party and Radiohead have succeeded as complete statements through their indivisible totality. As great as the singles plucked from those albums are, they're best served within the context of a deliberate tracklisting, constituting a complimentary and considered ebb and flow. And so it goes, The Walkmen, ever the contrarians, release an album that's a complete and inseparable body of work, spanning fourteen tracks in just under an hour. Stranger still, it's also released on a record label famed for their prescient singles by soon-to-be-big bands. Times have certainly changed.
Past albums have hung together somewhat chaotically, but You & Me represents a significant break in that tradition. Built on what appears a pissed logic, the fourteen songs here fit together like a sonic Jenga, purposeful but crooked, threatening to collapse in on one another as if the blocks themselves are pickled and soused. There are stand out moments of course, but for the most part it's an egalitarian record, the individual parts working to serve the whole. And what a graceful whole it is.
As a consequence, and no doubt a key stumbling block for the casual fan, there's an immediate realisation that nothing on You & Me is as instant as 'The Rat'. That song represents a different band and it's an albatross too, swinging dead weight around begrudging necks. You & Me demonstrates however that The Walkmen have stiff enough conviction to stand tall and firm on their own terms.
Fame never sat well with The Walkmen, always crashing in on a party that they never wanted to attend anyway. The soirees they frequent now are less the champagne air kisses their brief flirtation with MTV2 afforded them and more 2am red wine stained teeth. They're the academic drunks singing into the breeze, trenchcoats pulled to the nose, wind romantically whipping at their always serious endeavours, lamenting the loss of something, of anything but belief in their own art. This unassuming confidence is what charges You & Me, displaying a band out on their own, ignorant to commercial expectations and revelling in it. Consequently, although it doesn't so much resemble their most recent output, You & Me couldn't have been written by any other band.
They wear the outsider aesthetic well too, that troubled style fashioning an enigmatic sound world that's lush and complete and charged with gravitas. The trademark antiquated fairground keyboard chirp that's consistently permeated throughout their back catalogue continues to radiate here. It waltzes through the album's best moments, the very sound of heavy-hearted resolve, of three day stubble, of kitchen sink resignation. Its nakedness is the very opposite of rock and roll excess, but no less enveloping or lived in for it.
It's this richness of You & Me that's its true achievement. It's a gauche term, but there's a distinctly vintage feel here; slightly weathered but utterly classic. The tension built into 'On The Water' conjures images of De Niro and Pacino's first shared screen time in Heat, sans the crippling egomania and Hollywood flash. 'Red Moon' is a beautifully affecting lullaby and 'Four Provinces' yearns and twists like the broken down dream of young love turned old, forgetful and ultimately comforting in its perseverance. In fact, the latter is a fitting summation of where The Walkmen are now. Gone is the bitchiness of past lyrical concerns (see the whole of debut album Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone or even 'The Rat' for example), replaced with a more thoughtful and ponderous realisation that there's more grace in embrace than in bitter eschewal. It's the less common but equally cathartic post-break up record.
They've shown signs before, but You & Me displays a band that have grown into themselves, built a little sonic enclave that's unmistakeably and wilfully them and them alone. It's perhaps their least commercial record, certainly their most difficult, out of time and out of sync in its stubborn monochrome etched melancholy. But it's also their most human; a fitting achievement for a band that have consistently transformed earnest into an art form.
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