A mutual appreciation has developed between garage-pop darlings The Walkmen and Nashville in recent years. Local bastion of the rock scene Grimey's typically holds listening parties for each new Walkmen release, and at The Walkmen's show at The Basement in October of 2008, The Privates — a Nashville outfit featuring multiple Grimey's employees — even performed alongside The Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser to a full house of ecstatic fans.
"When we played that show at The Basement, that was a really fun time for us," explains Walkmen organist Peter Bauer. "The local connection ... is a lot stronger [in Nashville] than, say, most of the Southeast, and really most of America." It could be a mutual esteem that grows from Nashville being a musician's town. On top of making melodically absorbing music, The Walkmen are — each and every one — exceptionally proficient, but even more importantly, they're tasteful, graceful and patient in a manner that's typically indicative of top-notch studio players and other career musicians, and that's something Nashvillians are quick to recognize.
It's little surprise that The Walkmen are keeping their streak of critically lauded releases alive with 2010's Lisbon. With six LPs in 8-and-a-half years — plus sundry EPs and special releases — the New York-slash-D.C.-based quintet defies the odds not only by maintaining steam, but also by covering new ground, maturing and evolving with each release.
They've taken on a familiar but somehow newly mellow air with Lisbon. While there are fewer moments with the ferocious vigor of fan favorites like "The Rat" — "Angela Surf City" and "Victory" come close at times — Lisbon still features the verby, breezy guitars, smart organs and first-rate vocal performances (courtesy of peerless frontman Leithauser) that we all came to know on records like Bows and Arrows and Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone. The clever rhythmic turns and gleefully explosive moments still exist, but they're fewer, further between and more strategically executed: This is a band maturing, but not a band slowing down.
And with their maturation comes an air of reflection and nostalgia.
"It's kind of about the feeling we had when we went there," says Bauer, referring to the album's namesake city. While playing in Lisbon, Portugal, months ago, the band arrived at a collective feeling that resonated enough to stick. "We just kind of wandered aimlessly. I think it sort of has to do with that feeling: Going to this exotic and strange place — this beautiful city ... it has a mysterious quality to it when you go to a place like that for the first time."
But as Bauer explains, the record wasn't named after some specific event or locale. There was no "avenue in the north of town where there was, like, a knife fight or something." (Though he admits that a collection of songs about secret knife fights "does sound like it would be a good record.") Instead, the name Lisbon captures a pensive, ruminative tone that, though it's difficult to pin down, worked for a record that remained in limbo for a time — lacking "a sense of finality and moving forward," as Bauer puts it.
Luckily, the album didn't languish forever. And Leithauser's heartbreaking, nostalgia-fueled lyrics translate precisely what the moody, surf-inflected guitars and rich organs were trying to tell us all along: Life as an adult, punctuated with sharp moments of beauty and meaningfulness, never suddenly snaps into clear focus, but rather slowly materializes all around you, lurching forward whether you like it or not. "Back to school, back to work / Can this go on forever?" Leithauser sings in "Angela Surf City." "Angela, what's the difference? / Life goes on all around you."
And as life goes on, Bauer assures us that there's plenty more to come from The Walkmen, if and when their demanding schedule allows. "We're probably going to do something this coming summer that will be different but hopefully substantial," promises Bauer. "Not one of those things that people just toss off and sell for the sake of selling. ... Maybe an EP or a bunch of live stuff, but something we work on really hard." Considering that Lisbon is as cinematic and mature as any release The Walkmen have produced, anything they "work on really hard" sounds promising enough.
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