The Walkmen’s Bows + Arrows has a bitter cold streak

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Walkmen Bows + Arrows

In January 2015 I found myself caught in a blizzard in New York City. I’d tagged along on a work trip with my wife for the second or third time in as many years, unbothered by the cold but unprepared for the severity of the storm. Subway lines and highways shut down, and shops and restaurants closed early. On weekdays offices closed and people headed to Central Park to sled and make snowmen, but at night, if you were visiting, god help you if your dinner plans weren’t just a block or two away. Our plans fell through, so we just layered up, went outside and walked, pelted by icy winds and flurries in search of a couple of bar seats and some sustenance.

That cold, desolate walk through the snowy streets of New York City is what The Walkmen‘s Bows + Arrows sounds like to me. Unique among their peers in the early 2000s eruption of NYC rock, the band’s music scarcely resembled the classic rock hedonism of The Strokes nor the ebullient chaos of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, nor even the sleek moroseness of Interpol’s bespoke post-punk. The Walkmen, on their 2002 debut Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone and even more so on 2004’s Bows + Arrows, made music with a bitter cold streak, whether through the snarling misanthropy of breakout single “The Rat” or through the ramshackle, reverb-laden plinks of Paul Maroon’s piano, each note arriving like snow drifting toward the sidewalk. Regardless of their appearance on The O.C. amid their rising indie success, you can still hear a basement rehearsal space with a broken radiator if you listen closely enough.

In a past life, three-fifths of The Walkmen—guitarist/pianist Maroon, organist Walter Martin, and drummer Matt Barrick—were members of Jonathan Fire*Eater, an it band in the late ’90s when New York was temporarily relieved from being an it city. Their live shows became legendary, and the group’s idiosyncratic take on garage rock—charged with glowing embers of Farfisa organ and vintage-tone guitars that sounded more like they had been distorted through excess volume than an effects pedal—briefly earned them a major label deal with DreamWorks. But late frontman Stuart Lupton’s heroin addiction resulted in too much erratic behavior, canceled shows, and the eventual end of the band. In the aftermath, The Walkmen picked up where that ill-fated band left off, with singer Hamilton Leithauser taking the reins—as well as the addition of bassist Peter Bauer—the well-honed vintage tone of JF*E remaining a distinctive element of The Walkmen’s sound even as Leithauser’s scratchy wail gave it an even more aggressive presence.

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone found The Walkmen introducing themselves with a uniquely tailored sound of tweed and hardwood, weathered and seasoned in both post-punk and pre-rock antiquities. By the time they released their sophomore album Bows + Arrows via the Warner-affiliated Record Collection, the group had filled in the gaps that aesthetic alone couldn’t seal, offering what remains their greatest album via a mixture of garage rock bombast, rickety barroom balladry and some kind of strange hybrid of the two. For all the fury of its driving rock singles like “The Rat” and “Little House of Savages,” only The Walkmen are capable of creating something like “The North Pole,” which transitions from jangly rock anthem to dreamily surreal twinkle effortlessly. (Also, The North Pole? Famously cold.)

But sure, let’s go ahead and talk about those noisy rock songs. “The Rat,” an unimpeachably great song, has been accused of overshadowing the rest of the album—technically true, only so far as it overshadows any song—seethes with resentment and bitterness, made all the more palpable through Leithauser’s fire-throated vocal performance. “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor,” he sings with a mouth full of venom, “Can’t you hear me? I’m bleeding on the wall!” There’s no chorus, just verses and bridges full of anger—it would be a curious choice for a single if it didn’t go as hard as it does. “Little House of Savages” is a bit less complex, a two-chord basher about desperately trying to escape personal consequences that’s a blast in spite of its almost certain unspoken disaster of an ending.

The subtler moments on the record are no less worthy of praise even when they move at a slower pace, and the frustration and confusion of young adulthood isn’t any less frustrating or confusing. “My Old Man” creeps rather than rages, but with thorny edges and an acknowledgement of poor judgment: “You’re a sure thing, but I know I don’t need this now.” The feeling’s a bit more lively on “New Year’s Eve,” but the feeling of poorly defined boundaries and fading connections is familiar, Maroon’s bittersweet piano chords scoring the complaints of an annoyed neighbor and doomed winter tryst.

To be clear, there is heat on this album—a lot of it. It radiates from Martin’s organ, constantly, glowing orange like coils in a space heater. It’s also in the bile in Leithauser’s throat in “The Rat,” and it’s especially sweltering in the roaring highlight “Thinking of a Dream I Had,” but it’s less the heat from direct sunlight than being in a room packed beyond capacity, each person’s body heat multiplied past the point of perspiration.

Even in its internal violence and mostly frosty exterior, Bows + Arrows is neither inaccessible nor even really antisocial, apart from some of its monologues (“Now I go out alone, if I go out at all“). These are expertly written pop songs beneath the vintage gear and misplaced hostility, and the few times I heard the band play them live, they ripped. In contrast to The National’s Matt Berninger asserting in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In the Bathroom that boyfriends hated The Strokes, dudes absolutely love The Walkmen. I’ve seen so many high fives, side-hugs and clinked beer cans at their shows, and it’s not just a distant observation. I, a dude, share that affection for the band.

Since that New York blizzard I’ve moved to the East Coast, just this month experiencing a citywide water outage provoked by a winter storm—a stressful enough event, not to mention other compounding issues that I won’t get into, that I wasn’t actually thinking all that much about music for at least a few days. But when the taps resumed flowing and the state of emergency calmed, another night of snow arrived to bookend the week. As I watched a stream of snow falling beneath a streetlight as it slowly blanketed my block, I couldn’t help but feel that what I needed in that moment was Bows + Arrows on the turntable.


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