The Walkmen at Brooklyn Bowl
Since the last time legendary indie-rock quintet The Walkmen went on tour, we Walkmen fans have grown a bit older. A bit rounder. A bit grayer. Indeed, it’s been 11 years since the band put out a record — 10 since they last went on tour — and that made the lyrics of their undeniable banger “The Rat” hit just a little bit harder when they played it Saturday night at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl.
“When I used to go out I would know everyone that I saw,” sang frontman Hamilton Leithauser in that impossibly high tenor of his. “Now I go out alone, if I go out at all.”
Four songs in, “The Rat” landed a lot earlier in the set than most of us likely expected, seeing as how it’s the band’s best-known song and a nuclear-level blast of energy, powered by Matt Barrick’s explosive drumming. But this is a band that doesn’t really have any lackluster songs, or weak-link members, or anything that made their roughly 100-minute set drag for even a moment.
Yeah Baby at Brooklyn Bowl
The evening kicked off with an opening set from The Walkmen’s fellow New Yorkers Yeah Baby, a very young and very shoegazy quartet. Heavy on vibes, Joy Division influence and Jesus and Mary Chain sonics, Yeah Baby had all the aesthetics of a band that would’ve hit its peak about a decade-and-a-half before frontwoman Hanna White and her colleagues were likely even born.
The venue had filled out a bit by the time Leithauser & Co. took the stage around 9:15 — it may not have been a sellout, but the place certainly looked like it was close to full capacity. It was off to the races from the downbeat of “What’s in It for Me” from 2004’s Bows + Arrows: guitarist Paul Maroon’s raw, deafening tone; multi-instrumentalists Walter Martin and Peter Bauer swapping off between bass, keys and percussion; Leithauser grinning his way through it as hundreds of voices joined him on tunes like “In the New Year” and “Wake Up”; the whole band looking vaguely like an assemblage of rumpled professors from some Northeastern liberal arts college.
The Walkmen at Brooklyn Bowl
Leithauser was talkative throughout the set, informing us that 2008’s You & Me is his favorite Walkmen record and that years of loud rock shows have given him a condition known as “machine gunner’s ear.” Between picking up his old, beat-up Telecaster to strum on every third or fourth song, he also asked who at Brooklyn Bowl had been present for the band’s very first show in Nashville, on some “street corner” as he recalled it. (Best guess? He was referring to a 2002 performance at East Nashville’s Slow Bar, which has since become 3 Crow Bar, and will soon become a cannabis bar.) Other set highlights included the optimistic, forward-looking “Juveniles” — a good bookend to the harsh, acerbic “The Rat” — and a main-set-closing “Heaven.” Leithauser noted that the latter, from 2012’s album of the same name, was the last song the band has written together to date.
After a brief departure from the stage, The Walkmen returned for an encore featuring “Thinking of a Dream I Had,” “We’ve Been Had” (the first song the band ever wrote together, we were told) and Leithauser contending with a seemingly broken mic stand. Earlier in the night, the singer said that when the band was first deciding to reunite and return to the road, he wasn’t sure anyone would remember “who the fuck The Walkmen were.”
Turns out plenty of us remember. And lucky for us, Brooklyn’s finest haven’t lost a step.
The Spin: The Walkmen at Brooklyn Bowl, 9/16/2023
With Yeah Baby
The Walkmen at Brooklyn Bowl
