In a gorgeous theater nestled in the southwestern most corner of Rhode Island, history is happening. Save for one performance a few nights prior on The Late Show, NYC indie legends The Walkmen are reuniting for their first full-length live performance in almost ten years. It comes even before a string of shows in NYC, and everyone who has made it out to the United Theatre has done so with some knowledge of the significance of this night. Calling it quits in 2013 after a run of six well-received LPs, the band was among an upper tier of acts such as The Strokes, The National, and LCD Sound-system that gave the city a particular tone of voice in the fertile era of the mid-aughts that shaped the broader “indie rock” genre irrevocably. While one scene could never encompass the whole of the New York experience, The Walkmen and their comrades at the time mined genuine gold from those crucial years where one’s still-relatively-newfound agency rubs up against the reality of aging, ephemeral relationships, and other rough edges of life.
The band takes the stage under blue light around 9:15 to massive cheers, and each of the five members picks up or sits at their instrument. Front and center is singer Hamilton Leithauser, whose truly one-in-a-million vocal delivery is inseparable from the band’s sound, able to summon an immense range of emotion with inimitable textural detail. Instruments to hand, the band begin with a simple drone, the focus creeping into the face of each one – this isn’t a song just yet, it’s just a sound, like they’re trying to divine the exact moment at which the hiatus will truly end. And in one instant, that noise becomes ‘They’re Winning’, the song that introduced much of the world to The Walkmen in 2002 at the top of their debut LP, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone. “I’ve stood in line so many times, how could I do it all again?” Leithauser asks, while Paul Maroon and Walter Martin combine on guitar and synth, respectively, for the buildup, as Peter Bauer on bass keeps steady time. The song is a thematically-rich choice for a (re-)introduction, but the real anticipation lurks within what will come after: how will The Walkmen proceed with their first show in a decade after the logical choice is employed? The changeover comes with an immense dose of welcome surprise.
‘The Rat’ was a defining song for The Walkmen when it was released in 2004 ahead of Bows + Arrows. It was the type of thing that made just about anyone in earshot seek out the band and listen more; probably the type of thing that has made people want to pick up an instrument in the first place. To this day, the 2008 performance of it from Pitchfork’s “Juan’s Basement” segment will crop up on the music side of Twitter for some reason or another, a classic to be revisited, not quite a secret but something that ought to be rewatched now and again simply to remember it’s real. To place the song so early in the night is somewhat unexpected, but the crowd is ready to sing along to it like they’ve been needing to do so for ten years. It’s Leithauser’s voice at the pinnacle of its power, and with the way he closes his eyes and sails his right hand through the air like he’s throwing a pitch, or leans back with the mic close to his face, it’s clear his whole self is in each crescendo. But as much as the song is defined by its vocal, equally impressive is the instrumental, especially the distinct layer of Martin’s synth and the virtuosic drumming of Matt Barrick. Like other once-thought-unlikely reunions of bands, hearing the song live carries a power that is simply surreal.
The night is an expansive tour through the six albums the band made during their first run, though the focus does bend towards both Bows + Arrows and 2008’s You & Me. From the latter, standout ‘In the New Year’ sees Leithauser walk forward a bit to the lip of the stage and fans outstretched arms to sing to the song’s first swell. “This is a slow jam we haven’t played in a long time,” he says to introduce ‘No Christmas While I’m Talking’, which with its languid, almost abstract pace served as a polar counterpart to ‘The Rat’ which immediately preceded it in their album’s track listing.
Leithauser also elaborates a bit on the creative process of the band before some early songs, reminiscing fondly of how they wrote tunes like ‘Wake Up’ before they’d even settled in their practice space, and later names ‘The Blizzard of ‘96’ – which begins fittingly with clear keys and Barrick shaking bells – as the oldest song they’ll play tonight. Some songs were even ideas for other bands, Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Recoys, whose dissolutions led to the formation of The Walkmen. Bauer, Martin, and Maroon switch instrumental roles across multiple songs, sometimes eschewing the synths altogether such as with the bouncy, Western-influenced, interlocking guitar patterns of ‘Blue as Your Blood’, one of many times the band has employed different palettes of sound; other examples including the horns that adorn ‘Louisiana’ and other songs throughout their catalog. Barrick’s drums change sound when he adopts mallets for the three-fourths meter of ‘Dónde Está la Playa’, and just he and a guitar accompany Leithauser in the verses of ‘Angela Surf City’ until the chorus sees everyone come crashing together as Leithauser gives another one of his most intense performances, and hands from the crowd go up in the air at the same moment.
The back half of the night’s setlist contains another pair from Bows + Arrows, ‘Little House of Savages’ and ‘138th Street’. The former contains the line, “Let’s take a ride,” and a near-identical line appears in ‘Dónde Está la Playa’ – it’s this kind of scene-setting, this subjunctive notion of just sliding into a car on some evening and ending up somewhere not necessarily clear, that was a hallmark of this era of lyricism, if only to be subverted by the tone of the latter track which finds someone on the cusp of leaving that stage of life behind. Of the next song, ‘All Hands and the Cook’, Leithauser confides that over the band’s lifespan it became one of their favorite songs to play live. It’s easy to see why – once again the warbling electric organ sound rises prominently, almost overwhelmingly, to the ceiling, and again he gets to cut loose vocally.
There’s big cheers for ‘Heaven’ as the final song of the main set, but the band doesn’t keep the crowd waiting for long and reemerges with another five songs ready to go. A trio of these come from You & Me, and true to the album’s title are notably forlorn; loss and separation abound, and these emotions graft themselves to Leithauser’s timbre as well now as they did when they were put to tape. And finally, to end this milestone show, the band opts once again for a thematically-significant choice of song. ‘We’ve Been Had’, as Leithauser tells it, is the first song the band wrote at their first practice, and so they close the loop on this first show by bringing things back to the very start. It’s touching to think of these same five people, decades ago, sprawled around a practice space in New York writing this tune they’d be playing live in 2023 at the start of a reunion tour, still making music together. As the band plays the last bit, Leithauser descends from the stage and walks across the front row, shaking outstretched hands as he goes from end to end. Smiles on both sides of the railing, there’s a true sense of reciprocation, each side waiting to reunite with the other – and one can hardly think of a better way for The Walkmen’s “Revenge Tour” to begin.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
