One of my favourite albums of 2004 was BOWS AND ARROWS by New York band The Walkmen. Hamilton Leithauser, Walter Martin, Peter Bauer, Matt Barrick and Paul Maroon had created a brutally honest and highly distinctive sound in a year when pretty much everything sounded the same. But the thing that struck me most with the album was its emotional intensity, and the question arose as to whether the next album would be as good. A HUNDRED MILES OFF is the new album and marks this band out as one of the most interesting to emerge in the last ten years.

Opening track Louisianaopens as a polite, country rock tune spiced with Tex-Mex instrumental flourishes and Leithauser’s pleading voice reminding me of Bob Dylan. As this excellent song progresses it becomes more rampant, and opens the way for next track Danny’s At The Wedding with its razor-sharp, rollercoaster instrumental backdrop. It’s a unique and compelling sound akin to the yell of pain from a raw, exposed nerve. Leithauser’s vocal follows the same tack and at the end of it you just know you’ve been stretched on the torturer’s rack. Good For You, Good For Me sustains the ambience and one gets the feeling that these songs were recorded in a single, passionate take without the sanitising touch of technology. Emma Get Me A Lemon adds a powerful melody and a machine-gun drum rhythm that drives the song to kingdom come. It’s startling stuff and if one was trying to fit this music into a nice, neat generic box, it would be a fruitless exercise. All Hands And The Cook adds the most extraordinary, incessant guitar riff behind another powerful melody and superb vocal performance. I promise you’ll have not heard anything like this fabulous song. Later on the menu the pace stakes are upped to impossible levels as Tenleytown races along at breakneck speed with the fastest drum beats and guitar chords I think I’ve ever heard. Lyrically the boys are on the button and there are no finer examples of their art than the gorgeous, downbeat Brandy Alexander and Another One Goes By that concludes the album.

This is rock like you’ve never heard it before, and essential listening.

4.5/5