Music Week

STYLE FOR MILES

BY JOSHUA OSTROFF

In 2004, little-known rockers The Walkmen pulled ahead of the pack with "The Rat," a single that set a new standard for indie-rock epics, brought the band from New York to The OC and topped many critics' best singles lists, including my own.

But crafting a song that pounds and bleeds for the repeat button can be a double-edged sword, especially after a year on the road.

"You play 'The Rat' every day and it becomes so muscular and such a physical thing that the other songs suffer, so your older songs really become these huge monsters, too," explains gravelly-voiced singer Hamilton Leithauser. "Everything had to be so big and forceful, so when we wanted to write new songs, the last thing we wanted to do was write more big rockers."

It's true that A Hundred Miles Off, The Walkmen's follow-up to 2004's sophomore breakthrough Bows + Arrows, "doesn't kick that level of ass" but it's also allowed the five-piece to add more nuance to their urgency.

But a more subdued, less morose style wasn't the only major change this time around. After completing their tour, guitarist Paul Maroon and drummer Matt Barrick moved to Philadelphia, necessitating a division of labour when it came to songwriting that closely mirrored the members' pre-Walkmen bands The Recoys and Jonathan Fire*Eater.

"We're always better if we work in small groups. If you get all five of us together, there are too many distractions and you don't get too much done," Leithauser says. "When we broke down into two groups, things just started moving a lot faster. We'd come up with parts and then every once in a while we put 'em together and then you got a song."

So Leithauser worked primarily with keyboardist Walt Martin (also his first cousin) and bassist Pete Bauer, both of whom decided to spark inspiration by switching instruments for this album. The Philly pair worked with a small home set-up while the New York crew used their own Harlem studio Marcata (which they've since lost because the building was absorbed by Columbia University) but when they rejoined forces, the recording faltered, as they couldn't nail down their new sound.

"The engineering just wasn't up to snuff and we decided we didn't want to waste time improving our engineering skills when we've got these songs and we really wanna just do them," Leithauser says. "We might as well do what everybody else does and get somebody who's been doing it awhile to help us get the tone."

So they picked up and headed back home to Washington, DC, where all five of them had grown up.

"We recorded it at the studio where I worked in high school. We all went home and lived at our parents' houses; we'd pick each other up to commute every morning. It was incredible," says Leithauser nostalgically. "I'd dreamed of recording there."

Ironically, going back to a studio where Fugazi once recorded caused The Walkmen to lose some of their DC-learned self-seriousness, lightening up the musical mood with trumpets, lap steel, a gourd and some island rhythms -- they even donned Three Amigos-style cowboy outfits in the video for first single "Louisiana." Leithauser's rasp has also grown more Dylanesque, as he puts more focus on lyrical storytelling.

"We tried to come from a different direction. It's OK to have a song that everybody wants to hear more. But you've got to keep yourself interested," Leithauser says. "You lose some old fans and you gain some new ones -- which is the way it should be. Though you don't want to lose too many people."

THE WALKMEN PLAY THE PHOENIX (410 SHERBOURNE) JUNE 27 WITH RICHARD SWIFT, ROCKWELL. $15 FROM ROTATE THIS, SOUNDSCAPES, HORSESHOE, TICKETMASTER.