Today I picked up the Walkmen’s new(er) album Bows & Arrows with some birthday lucre (it was yesterday), and holy cow, how good is its lead single, “The Rat”? It sounds like what Joy Division might have sounded like had Ian Curtis conquered his depression and directed his anger outward instead. The urgency of the tune–the careening guitars, the high hum of the keyboard, the pounding drums pulled way up in the mix–is simply flabbergasting. The video is brilliant as well–just simple, high-contrast black-and-white footage of the band performing the song in its Mercata Studio space, their restraint almost unbearable in light of the fury of the song.
I’m not very far into the rest of the record, but it seems like they’ve become a much louder band, without abandoning the peripatetic song structures that made their first album such a hauntingly bitter pill to swallow. This is a very, very talented band.