The Walkmen: "Postcards From Tiny Islands"

There’s this great bit near the end of this song where Hamilton Leithauser, in full-on belt mode, sings “Life is so easy now / Everything is working out,” and the way he draws out the line you sort of do believe him. Like the rest of his band, he has an amazing knack for when to lie low in a track, and when to up and devour it. “Postcards from Tiny Islands” does nothing but play to these strengths. It may even be the most deliriously fun track they’ve recorded.

Because when the percussion bell-hops and the band respond in kind (as in, with a force and temerity usually reserved for songs called “The Rat”), the thing doesn’t come to a blindside, or even a climax. That chorus is there as a loud placeholder: as if the band needed, first, to hunker itself over the street before resetting the bar for a new nostalgia tip. As a hook, it goes cheek-by-jowl with a pretty hilarious two-chord riposte that by itself suggests drunkenness, but sidled next to Hamilton Leithauser’s soaring parry-ons , reaches what I guess I’m about to call wit. It’s a really catchy chorus, at once unsubstantial and concretely startling. It goes, and stays, nowhere and then does nothing but imbue that space with bawlsome Romantics and the sense that there’s shit (and, no doubt, with this band there is always shit) at stake. This band wrote the only good song for Spiderman 3, remember.

And, really, aren’t these guys just the best band? They write nothing but Walkmen songs—which means, really, that they have this freakish ability to make you feel like one of them, which: cool! “I’m Never Bored” is still everyone’s theme-tune, right? What I’m getting at is that they’ve already got an established sound: upmarket, embittered, and suggesting in its ragged see-saw a kind of antisocial concern, a very elegant social suicide. What “Postcards” and its parent album do for that sound is not so much to further deepen it as to chuck that breadth over genres and emotions previously sidelined for straighter hooks, grander gestures. This is the Walkmen with some serious fucking breathing space, and it sounds phenomenal.