The Walkmen

Though critically praised as one of those “The” bands bringing real rock & roll back to the mean streets of a wildly gentrified New York City, the Walkmen usually struck us as a tad wishful and generic: a band that was only the sum of its vintage affectations. Reverb? Check. Tight, snappy tunes with an early Kinks punch? Yup. Oxford shirts? Gotcha.But in the case of the Walkmen, the musicians seemed more like earnest mannequins powered by a ’60s AM transistor radio. Fun, if you hadn’t already lived through three consecutive garage-rock revivals. Something clicked for the ex-members of Jonathan Fire*Eater in 2006, with the horn-heavy A Hundred Miles Off and a complete front-to-back cover album of Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats. The results were varied, but the experimentation loosened ties to fading rock trends.

On its fifth album, You & Me, the band stretches further without changing its script. Played in a blindfold test, the minimalist lullaby “Long Time Ahead of Us” might be a less-wordy Joe Henry song or a Tex-Mex ballad, as a plaintive Hamilton Leithauser sings over subdued organ, stately drums and what sounds like a xylophone distorted to resemble the plinky aura of a West Africa thumb piano.

Elsewhere, as on “On the Water” and “Red Moon,” the subtle grasp of dynamics and instrumental color paints a richer emotional landscape than the band’s old signature echo effect could achieve. There’s plenty of that, of course—as always. Yet at the rate they’re going, it’d be no surprise to see these guys touring with, say, a mariachi band.