David Singer Posts

The Walkmen are a terrific five-piece band from Brooklyn, New York. Their music is sometimes loud and cathartic ("The Rat", from the sublime Bows & Arrows LP), and sometimes it's spacey and ethereal ("We've Been Had", from Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone and a ubiquitous car commercial), but I like them best when they sound like a ramshackle wedding band floating down the Mississippi on a barge at midnight ("Louisiana" from last year's A Hundred Miles Off). Singer Hamilton Leithauser (dig that crazy richboy name!) has one of my favorite voices in indie rock. Get this: they even covered Harry Nilsson's weirdo Pussy Cats LP in its entirety. And released it. Is that cool or what?

They have a new record coming out in September, but you can get it now for only FIVE BUCKS from AmieStreet.com, and the band will donate all proceeds to charity. Furthermore, the album is magnificent; rickety pianos chiming through deep fields of dark reverb, guitars that sound like strummed spider webs, distant horns cribbed from a gypsy funeral. The songs are absolutely beautiful, but I would recommend this record for the sound of the tambourine alone. Go get it.

Canadian Girl

The Rat

We've Been Had

Louisiana

Links:

The Walkmen - "You & Me" LP for five bucks: