::The Walkmen - Bows and Arrows::

The Strokes. Yeah, the Walkmen kind of sound like the Strokes. They both have that wildly crooning singer that seems really impassioned yet bored at the same time. They both dress well. They’re both from New York. And, in the last six months, they both put out records that are much more impressive than their predecessors.

The comparisons between the Strokes and Walkmen pretty much end in their specific locations, the Strokes are from downtown Manhattan while the Walkmen call uptown home. Where the Strokes are all parallel lines and Mondrian-esque, the Walkmen take a crescendo and make the song to melt into itself like grilled cheese (see “No Christmas While I’m Talking”). Also, where the Strokes seem pleasantly grimy, the Walkmen actually embrace a weathered songwriting approach.

That’s not to say that their chops are underdeveloped and woefully scratchy. Rather, the Walkmen’s production, which they mostly do themselves, allows their songs much more space to breathe than the Strokes’ airtight veneer.

While the Strokes are good, the Walkmen are better. The thing about the Walkmen is that they don’t care about the garage-rock thing that much anymore.

In the late 90s three of the five Walkmen were in the superb Jonathon Fire*Eater, which predated pretty much every half-rate “rock revivalist” that M2 deems “buzzworthy” (screw you, Jet). They’ve taken the standard three-chord songs as far as they can go and now challenge themselves to embrace more orchestrated and difficult territory.

The outcome is nearly perfect. While their last album Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone, with a song in a Saturn car commercial, was simply catchy; Bows and Arrows, on the other hand, is even more accessible, memorable and rewarding all at once.

Songs fluctuate between brink-of-disaster rockers like “Little House of Savages” and the utterly fantastic “The Rat” to the mood-oriented and rhythmless “Hang On, Siobhan.” The fact that they seamlessly fluctuate between sweat and sweetness is impressive. After all, can you say that for their colleagues in the Strokes?

Nay.

The only problem encountered with the different types of songs is that the fluidity of the album is compromised. Twice the listener’s heart rate is brought up only to be suddenly cut off in heart-wrenching laments. Of course, this is only a minor problem in the long run, because individually the songs stand up separate from the whole.

The more and more I think about it, the Walkmen don’t really sound like they should be related to that god-forsaken/holy place that is known as New York City. Their sound is too natural, too dreamy. There’s an environment that lives in this record and it’s not the high rise, fashionista life of the East Village, but the snowy, cold winters experienced all along the eastern seaboard, looking from the inside out. While the Strokes can and will always have New York pegged with Room on Fire, the rest of America can embrace Bows and Arrows as the soundtrack to the East Coast’s muffled landscape of winter.