pith…

With You & Me, The Walkmen built one of the most complete albums of 2008. It’s of a piece, a whole cloth constructed from its simple constituent elements, like a scarf wrapped about the neck and head. Each song’s exceedingly simple elements – the almost off-key vocals, icicle guitar riffs, basso profundo base, basic-chord synthesizer and resonant, mechanical percussion – build moody tunes that are more than the sum of their parts. The mix is just right, with each component pushed to the front, equal on an atmospheric, often restrained, plane. On past releases, The Walkmen have let themselves explode a bit, as with “The Rat” but, across all of You & Me, they’re a band of considerable restraint. The songs are often coiled, ready to strike – like that scarf would jump right off and get all up in somebody’s face, spewing a load of frustration you didn’t know you hid, or jerking tight, angry, right around your own throat – but they don’t. There’s no explosion, no release. To what end? Any release is as at least as temporal as joy in the landscape of You & Me. It all passes. Just keep moving.

Moving on, in time and person, is a consistent lyric image and the album moves well across the whole, from the solid opener through an essential instrumental interlude to the third track where mood and quality is sustained to the end. It’s an album that asks to be heard as a whole, in its arranged order, as much as any I’ve heard for some time. It’s a casually polished piece of subdued chamber rock, where the highs are never too high and the lows aren’t all that bad. It is best appreciated by somewhat alienated folks, people who know they’re as much a part of “out there”as they are “in here,” wherever that might be, apart from their immediate, or even intimate, surroundings. It’s an appropriate soundtrack for passing through the quotidian urban world or shutting out, though not forgetting, that same work-a-day world. Winter is its season. In tempo, mood and existential outlook, it’s a close cousin to The National’s Boxer. If there’s a single shard of lyrical pith, an emotional center to the whole, it’s probably: “And into the fire / I’ll tell you I love you.”