Nearly busting my ass trying to get down my ice-encrusted front steps and all but skating to the Variety Playhouse through the virtual ghost town that is Atlanta four days after a five-inch snowfall, I arrived at The Walkmen concert very much in need of some musical defrosting. After enduring The Lower Dens’ underwhelming and rather cacophonous-in-a-bad-way opening set, it was time for Hamilton Leithauser and his men to take the stage. A lovely stage, I might add, draped in velvet and bathed in soft aquatic-colored lights.
The Walkmen’s music triumphs in its ability to intertwine vocals and instrumentals in a way that feels at once intricately arranged and casually slapped together. Hamilton’s voice gyrates from the dissonant, bellowing indie-rocker moan to the bluesy, woozy swoon of an old-time crooner. There are flickers of anyone and everything—a Dylan lilt, a Waits rasp, a Sinatra swing—that come together into something uniquely familiar and familiarly unique. And the band plays on: sometimes with seas of rolling drums and clanging guitars crashing up against walls of organ (second encore, “The Rat”), sometimes with buzzy little landscapes of spunky percussion and catchy hooks (Lisbon stand-out “Blue As Your Blood”). It works.
In person, The Walkmen aren’t exactly what one might expect. Which is to say, they weren’t what I expected. Hamilton Leithauser is undeniably a cutie-pie; however, he looked like he was dressed for a first meeting with his girlfriend’s parents, and aside from his O-face singing contortions, behaved accordingly, with a likable but slightly anemic stage presence bolstered by inoffensive clips of between-song banter. “Every time we come to Atlanta, which has been about eight times, people always want to take us out after the show. And every time, it’s always the same place… a strip club. What’s it called, the Carmichael? The Clearwater Club?” Hamilton racked his brain whilst unknowingly inciting a Clermont Lounge chant in the crowd below, which is in and of itself an accomplishment, if not necessarily a difficult one ‘round these parts. Finally: “Oh right, right! The Clermont Lounge! Yes. Well we’ve never actually been there, but maybe this time…”
Something tells me that today Hamilton remains still tragically unaware of the fact that Blondie the 53-year-old stripper can crush an entire PBR can with her boobs. But I guess strip clubs are best referenced only in passing when dining with potential in-laws, so I’ll give him a break. He also talked about the weather, but given the fact that our little snowpocalypse was enough to shut down the entire Atlanta public school system for a week, I’ll give him a break there too.
Overall, the show was a surprisingly subdued affair, albeit suffused with a not-unpleasant sense of timelessness. Featuring a good chunk of their newest album, 2010’s Lisbon, amidst a smattering of earlier favorites—including whimsically anti-nostalgic gem “We’ve Been Had,” the first song the band ever wrote and the last one they played on Thursday—the show felt intimate and satisfying, if a bit lackluster. Straightforward in the same way that Spoon shows can be (and not just because Hamilton looks like a slightly more nourished version of Britt Daniel), The Walkmen delivered a perfectly adequate rendition of their much-loved tracks, but didn’t manage to propel them to any mind-blowing new levels.
Review by Hilary Cadigan
Photos by Max Blau
Photos by Max Blau
