Oct 16 2006
The Walkmen: A Hundred Miles Off
OTO Rating: 6/10
The Walkmen, like the Brian Jonestown Massacre, have becoming famous for not becoming famous. They’ve put out two albums of competent garage-pop, one brilliant single (“The Rat”), and if you mentioned them to the man on the street he’d probably tell you to get an ipod. So it’s only natural for these New Yorkers to try something different. And it’s simply unfortunate that they tried something so ill-fitting for them.
| Track listing:
01 Louisiana 02 Danny’s At The Wedding 03 Good For You’s Good For Me 04 Emma, Get Me A Lemon 05 All Hands And The Cook 06 Lost In Boston 07 Don’t Get Me Down (Come On Over Here) 08 Tenley Town 09 This Job Is Killing Me 10 Brandy Alexander 11 Always After You (‘Til You Started After Me) 12 Another One Goes By |
Instead of their classic, meticulous sound, A Hundred Miles Off sounds like a strange meld of scruffy, pounding rock. Perhaps the greatest weakness, though, is singer Hamilton Leithauser, whose vocals were once engagingly raw but now sound like the gangly love-child of Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart. This makes the lyrics completely unintelligible, but The Walkmen have never focused on the mind. Just listen to “All Hand and the Cook,” an atonal piece of gibberish that this band is much better than.
But the highlights are, in traditional Walkmen fashion, fantastic (and ten times better than the filler). Opener “Louisiana” is a scraggly mess of an “on-the-road” song, but somehow impossibly beautiful. Ironically one of the strongest numbers on this album is a cover of the Mazarin track “Another One Goes By,” whose shuffling, dreamy elegance is something entirely new to this band. It just goes to show how right this all could have gone.
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