The Walkmen – Lisbon
The Walkmen emerged in 2000 as another addition to the growing New York vintage rock scene, ing fan favourites like The Strokes and Interpol. Despite a string of well-received albums, The Walkmen have yet to experience the same popularity enjoyed by others in their league. And that’s a shame as Lisbon, the band’s recently released sixth LP, presents a drastically different alternative to the dark and melancholy albums of recent indie fanfare.
Don’t get me wrong, I love The National’s High Violet and The Antlers’ Hospice remains in heavy rotation on my iPod. However, amidst all these sad and somber tunes, I find myself looking for a sort of pick-me-up, something to get me through these dreary fall days.
Lisbon is exactly the bright blizzard of sound I have been searching for. Seeped in surf-rock nostalgia, filled with warm, infectious melodies and carrying a crisp simplicity throughout, Lisbon is a toe-tapping, shoulder-shaking thrill of an album.
The signature sounds of winding guitars, confident vocals and surging, pop-infused melodies that the group created in Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone, developed in Bows + Arrows and seemed to have perfected in You & Me, have culminated in Lisbon. This artistic development has resulted in an incredibly rich, fine-tuned and intentional album with a bright, yet decidedly vintage, ambiance. The opener, “Juveniles,” is a bouncy and breezy track that sets the tone of the album from the get-go. The jangly guitar featured in the verses is juxtaposed with heavy cymbals and soaring pop vocals in the chorus, proving that Lisbon has both pop and kick.
The punchy and up-tempo “Angela Surf City” is perhaps most reminiscent of The Walkmen’s earlier triumphs, demonstrating the same swelling intensity featured in “The Rat.” The track begins with rumbling drums and reserved guitar, leading to an explosive chorus with punchy chords and strong percussion.
“Stranded” serves as a shining example of the group’s growth in their use of brass—woozy horns underscore drawn-out vocals, coming to a strong and beautiful finale. Despite lead singer Hamilton Leitha’s loose lyrics, his prose is strikingly comprehensible and surprisingly captivating. An eager listener will no doubt be left “stranded and starry-eyed” by these moody lyrics.
The pulsing chords at the outset of “Victory” seem to foreshadow a throbbing, glorious chorus, but the verses are misleading and the track ends up as a bit of a disappointment—you just don’t get the ending you were hoping for. But not to worry, in the addictive surf-rock-inspired “Woe Is Me,” The Walkmen return to their signature sound in full-force. Zing-y guitar and a strong, steady beat build to a huge, rocking climax in the chorus and a powerful crescendo at the ending. It’s a damn good song.
In the latter part of the album, The Walkmen take it down a notch. “Torch Song” is a beautiful, fuzzy ballad with graceful vocals and surging percussion. Measured, slow and steady piano breaks alternate with thunderous cymbal crashes in the chorus. The band’s preference for vintage instruments and old-school sounds are well illustrated here in the lumbering six-string and backing oohs and aahs.
The final track “Lisbon” brings the album to a close with aching strings and lazy vocals. Starting out slow and building to an unexpected height, before drifting off, the track ties everything up quite nicely and demonstrates the incredible cohesiveness of the album as a whole.
Carefully measured numbers with a certain degree of restraint are balanced by raucous bursts of explosive strength and tracks with dizzying energy and disheveled vocals. But, the atmospheric value of the record is never compromised. Staying true to its vintage vibe, bouncy riffs and confident vocal smoothness, Lisbon plays from start to finish like a breeze.
—Claire Nelischer
PS I Love You – Meet Me At The Muster Station
Being a band in a small town is hard. Being a band in a small town in Canada is probably harder. You can be the most popular, most original and most talented group, but your audience is still limited by population.
Johnny Fay, drummer for The Tragically Hip said being a commercially successful Canadian band is “like being the world’s tallest midgets.”
Another Kingston band, PS I Love You, may be the city’s first band to break into national and global recognition based on Internet exposure. Earlier this year Pitchfork.com listed their single “Facelove” in their Best New Music category. It seems these days bands can tour on that accolade alone.
But Kingstonians know their success is a product of years of hard work. Paul Saulnier and Ben Nelson played in the local quartet Magic Jordan before branching off into a duo with a bit more emotion and a bit more precision. Three years of hard work, playing almost every venue in Kingston and recording demos, brought them to a deal with Paper Bag Records and their first LP.
Meet Me At The Muster Station is 10 tracks and 30 minutes of echo-y riffing that see the band reaching outside the fuzzy-minimalism of their live shows. Not that you’d notice any studio trickery, though. The album plays like it was recorded live in a big room and on a time-limit.
But the imperfections play to PS I Love You’s strengths. These songs are short blasts of emotion, not meant to be picked over by somebody who cares about playing perfectly on tempo or a radio-ready mix. It’s the noise of Dinosaur Jr. with notions of danceability like Death From Above 1979.
The album opens with its title track, a downward chord progression into Saulnier’s shouty yowl, sounding like a mix between Mick Jagger and Spencer Krug. It builds towards an epiphanic moment when he stomps in the complimentary notes on the bass pedal.
“2012” is a standout with its up-tempo, ramshackle display of guitar wizardry reverberating around Saulnier’s yelping and Nelson’s open hi-hat. Its chaos is more convincing as a treatise on apocalyptic theories than any John Cusack disaster film.
Even through the slower, more spacious tracks in the middle (“Cbez” and “Little Spoon”) PS I Love You retain their energy and their rawness. It’s a quality difficult to describe, or apply to a peer. The band is a confounding mix of noise and sublety, thrash and ability to still reach down and pull out a love song.
This crossroads is laid out plain over the closing three tracks, “Facelove,” “Get Over” and “Meet Me At The Muster Station (Pt.2).” The former starts with a pronouncement of feeling, “Your love is like a giant strawberry/ thrown in my face,” but with a sense of humour. It then explodes into a jumpy, double-time instrumental with progressing layers of shredding.
“Get Over” is an engineer’s nightmare. Nelson’s crackling stick-work floats around the stereo mix above a heavily distorted Sabbath thing from Saulnier’s guitar—like so distorted you can barely make out the notes. Then, with some 808 claps and a scream, the chorus enters with the bass pedal’s brown-notes nearly drowning out the entire mix, compression and EQ be damned. Beyond that, the song trails off into an electronic feel with flanging, phasing and a layer of electronic drums floating to the surface.
Then some of the cleanest guitar on the album starts the closing number, with a steady Jesus and Mary Chain kick-snare from Nelson and some Frank Black-style vocals from Saulnier. But quickly the guitar overlaps itself until it fades into a void of tape hiss and unknown clanging.
Every song on Meet Me At The Muster Station contains all the elements of every other song on the album. It’s an album of greatest hits, made up of songs that sound like compilations within themselves. It has something for everybody, but PS I Love You straight-up doesn’t care about enough formalities to retain cohesiveness. There are just enough annoyances on the record to keep away that universal appeal that the band clearly doesn’t want anyway. It’s just two guys having fun with microphones and playing with an energy that shows they don’t need to be the “biggest band in Canada,” even though they deserve to be.
—Tyler Ball
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