The Walkmen

Hamilton Leithauser opens his band's excellent new album with the lyrics, “It's back to the battle today, but I wouldn't have it any other way," and the first track "Dónde Está la Playa" goes on to both praise the virtues of late-night dancing while acknowledging the morning-after drawbacks.

This wary fence-straddling is present not only in the lyrics on You & Me, The Walkmen's fifth studio album, but also in the ringing guitars and shimmery, insistent cymbals of the elegiac rock songs. It's a sound that's both nostalgic for the early 2000's, when the band made its first big splash, yet aware that what has passed is past–and most likely unreclaimable. You & Me sounds like a band on the verge of growing up. They're unsure of friends with real jobs and tucked-in shirts yet out of place in that early-20s lifestyle. "You keep replaying through the days that have brought you to this place," Leithauser sings later in the album, "What happened to you?" And the eerie whistling on "On the Water" lends the track an otherworldly, Ennio Morricone-sense of otherness, while the keyboards throughout the album provide a dense backdrop for Leithauser's pained croon.

More than anything else, You & Me provides the morning after for the boozy late-night chronicling of 2004's Bows + Arrows, struggling against stasis while admitting that comforting sounds, surroundings and styles have a certain appeal. At 14 tracks the album overstays its welcome, and its songs start to run together, but that's a forgivable offense when the quality's this high.

—Chris Hassiotis
09.09.08

The Walkmen took a working holiday from their usual sound on their remake of Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats and, to a lesser extent, on the Dylan-goes-Latin vibe of A Hundred Miles Off, but they return to more familiar territory on You & Me. Quite literally, too: the band revisited the same studio where they laid down Bows + Arrows for some of this album's sessions. However, travel is one of You & Me's major themes, with beaches, holidays, and provinces placing these songs all over the map. That plays perfectly into the Walkmen's uncanny ability to conjure specific places in their music: "Donde Esta La Playa," from its turista title to its deconstructed surf guitars to lyrics like "there is still sand in my suitcase/there is still salt in my teeth," plays like blurry but vivid memories -- and proof that not everything that happens on vacation stays on vacation. Grotto-like reverb gives "Postcards from Tiny Islands"' riotous guitars a nostalgic twinge only heightened by small but telling details like "the bar band and their sorry songs." The Walkmen also travel through different sounds on You & Me: "Red Moon"'s gentle acoustic guitars and brass give it a subtly Latin feel, while "Canadian Girl"'s dreamy warmth suggests a vintage soul single that's been tucked away for decades in a forgotten jukebox. You & Me's return to the Walkmen's usual shadowy, introspective moodiness feels like a cloud covering the sun, especially after the drunken wake of Pussy Cats. Fortunately, that cloudiness suits these songs, particularly "On the Water," a darkly pretty ballad lit by faintly shimmering keyboards, and "In the New Year," which sets a bruised melody to jubilant organ swells that only sound more poignant together. Despite a few louder moments like "Seven Years of Holidays (For Stretch)"'s shambling waltz and "Blue Route"'s gut-punching drums, You & Me delves deeply into the evocative ballads that have made the band fascinating since Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone. The album closes with a trio of them, with the spare jangle of "New Country" and "If Only It Were True"'s final declaration "I'll die in dreams of you" ending You & Me on a somberly sweet note. This may or may not be the Walkmen's prettiest album, but it's certainly their loneliest. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide