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Home  Archive music profiles Sporting With The Walkmen
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Sporting With The Walkmen |
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Written by Sean Moeller
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Friday, 16 December 2005 |
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There’s a specific ring to singer Hamilton
Leithauser’s husky vocals—such as a tea kettle’s alarming howl—that
gives a pretty convincing indication of when his nipples have been
twisted too far in the wrong direction.
Call The Walkmen the squires of gamesmanship if it’s a suitable
sobriquet you’re looking for. They are the fair and the noble,
displaying all of the buckling airs of virtue that follow along behind
the footfalls of the regal. They are the aristocratic sportsmen with
puffy chests, classy active-suits, and musky pipe smoke as their
walking fragrances, who spend their afternoons with the foxes and their
purebred troupe of scaring hounds. Their sporting is just and an equal
opportunity is offered to the hunted. No hand is given and none is
taken. It is one against the other on a level surface, with the
advantage going to each who is witness to such a display of utter fair
play.
So much can be sifted, like golden flakes picked out of
a pan-full of pre-colonial Californian riverbed, from the choice of
title for a record. In this case, it’s the New York band’s sophomore
handiwork of Bows and Arrows that triggers the ontological corruption
of identity. These greasy, high-order chemists of pulsating new rock
ruptures no more have tailor-made smoking jackets and riding boots for
every day of the week as they are active participants of a 19th-century
hunting society. But they do seem like the types of old friends who,
were you ever to cross them, would give you a running start. And they
would track you in a gentlemanly fashion, lifting the strap of their
half-filled quiver slowly over one shoulder—counting to 20 Mississippi
before drawing back with the first arrow.
The record makes it
sound as if The Walkmen have been handicapping a shitload of pursuits.
It’s an assembly line chronicle of betrayals and letdowns perpetrated
by friends and associates. When enough’s enough, they fill the air with
carefully directed attacks. There’s a specific ring to singer Hamilton
Leithauser’s husky vocals—such as a tea kettle’s alarming howl—that
gives a pretty convincing indication of when his nipples have been
twisted too far in the wrong direction.
Bassist Pete Bauer
said that the character comparison and their generally dumpy luck with
finding and keeping loyal friends wasn’t explored all that deeply when
the album was actually christened what it was. But it works.
“I do have a lot of friends like that, but I’ve never really thought
about it before,” he said on the afternoon the band was set to meet up
with the suddenly meaningful Modest Mouse for a summer replacement
tour. “That’s a good idea. It was just sort of a vague title Walt
[Martin, organist] came up with. That was sort of the idea, though. And
we needed something.”
The group of former D.C. boys gone Apple
came out of the Lollapalooza meltdown with the most-prized indie rock
tour of the tide, locking up with the Isaac Brock outfit that somehow
finally got through to the numbskulls of big business music. The
Mousers will now eventually be able to carry health insurance after 11
years. (Okay, so Wolf Eyes, the neurotically noise-tastic
confuse-a-tron, scored a slot with Sonic Youth, but nobody counts to
second place.) The Walkmen were already going to be playing tour
off-dates with Modest Mouse to fill in the holes, so when the bottom
dropped free from the Perry Farrell brainchild, there wasn’t much
scrambling or panic to be had. This tour—through the rest of the
summer—will be the final leg supporting Bows and Arrows, after which
they call it quits and let the van engine cool to record a follow-up
record.
“We were a little bit worried, but we figured we’d be
all right,” Bauer said of the cancellation of the entire 16-city
Lollapalooza tour. “Our booking agent had to deal with a lot of crap
and he didn’t sleep for a couple nights. It’s too bad it had to happen;
it would have been a fun experience. But it’s okay, because our fans
aren’t big field people.
“ I think the shows [with Modest
Mouse] are going to be great. We played a college with them a long time
ago. I don’t really remember much from that show; I do remember they
were nice guys.”
Together since their old bands, the barely
remembered but memorably swirling almost-rans Jonathan Fire*Easter and
Leithauser and Bauer’s group The Recoys, disintegrated in late 1998,
the five members (also including drummer Matt Barrick and guitarist
Paul Maroon) have known each other much longer. All but Bauer went to
the same high school together in the nation’s capital. The strength of
brothers—Leithauser and Martin are actually cousins—is with them and it
never comes out in bickering or deconstructive ways. If a tiff arises,
it’s of no serious consequence and it ends as quickly as it starts with
the return to shitty homemade movies, chess grudges, and Scrabble
competitions.
“We like to have an activity when we’re on tour.
We have a video camera with us, and the other night we had a
fake-crying contest. We also had a fake-laughing contest. We also make
movies, but they come out a little boring. I think we’re a little
hesitant,” Bauer said. “I’m a Scrabble fan. Somehow, just by chance,
three people brought travel Scrabble on tour. We played the other day.
They think that words they don’t know are out of the spirit of the
game. They’re very close-minded. They complain.”
Even the
sportsmen of the year can have a limited patience. When it comes to
wooden letter tiles, a man and his temper are quickly parted.
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