On a recent fall evening, I met my cousin Stephen at a small venue called the Bottleneck to watch the Walkmen perform for a near-capacity audience.
I’ve never been a devoted fan of the Walkmen’s recorded work. Lead singer Hamilton Leithauser (holy name!) has a voice that can go quickly from “interesting” to “is that a potato peeler you’re using on my eardrum?” I own all of their albums, probably because so many critics love their work and definitely because I’m a sucker for giving bands fifth chances, but most of the songs on those albums stay far, far away from my cursor.
Despite my lukewarm opinion of the Walkmen as a faceless entity piped through my computer’s hard drive, I had reason to think there was hope for the band: I’d seen them play live. And even though my two chances for observation had been shared with several thousand of my closest strangers – once in the boiling sun of Austin City Limits Music Festival, and once for thirty minutes when my girlfriend and I used their stage as a meeting point during Lollapalooza – I’d been impressed by an engaging stage presence that promises speakeasies and Keep Cool With Coolidge buttons.
Thus, before their show at the Bottleneck, I felt about the Walkmen what I feel about threesomes: Wary, but willing to be convinced.
After Stephen and I enjoyed another blistering set by opener the Japandroids – “another” because we’ve now seen the Japandroids twice, and “blistering” because that’s one of the words you use when you’re describing live music – we bought a bottle of the nightly special and settled in to appraise the Walkmen in small-venue format.
We were not disappointed. The Walkmen were fantastic. And not just because the music was good, or because the band was filled with guys who, it seemed, would be fun to drink whiskey with. Mostly, the Walkmen were fantastic because they sounded really good.
Admittedly, the explanation in the above sentence is simplistic. “They sounded really good” could have been written by the kid in my seventh grade class who went by Raymond and who was fond of putting boogers in his own hair.
But this time, I meant what I wrote: the Walkmen sounded really good.
The reason the Walkmen sounded so good? They weren’t too loud.
[Siren.]
WARNING.
[Siren.]
WARNING. Your attention please.
[Siren.]
This is the commander speaking. The writer has become his father.
[Siren.]
Hear me out.
Rock music is best when it’s loud. When I’m in my kitchen, whipping up a concoction of chicken and mushrooms that is sure to blow away my audience of one, I turn up the volume. Same goes when I’m driving down the highway, en route to a movie by myself. Volume: Up.
But “loud,” by the measure of my car speakers, or by the dial on the receiver in my bedroom, is not the same as “loud” on a stack of Yamahas in a bar where some guy who says to call him Ace once taped a few pieces of foam to the ceiling in a half-hearted attempt to, “make it a little more band-friendly in here, dude.”
Sometimes, the answer is to turn the music down, a lesson I learned at an unlikely place: a Sevendust concert.
Six years ago, my brother Matt and I watched Sevendust at Kansas City’s Uptown Theater. We expected it to be mediocre; we were mostly going, I think, to rule out Sevendust as a band we liked. And so we could hear my father’s reply when we told him the name of the band we were going to see.
“You mean, like the pesticide?”
But Sevendust exceeded our expectations, and mightily. The secret to their success: They sounded really good. They resisted the temptation to overwhelm their audience with volume. Instead, they turned down their amps, if ever so slightly, and utilized the power – ARE YOU LISTENING, YOUNG BANDS? – of 1) clarity, and 2) silence. Then, because the quiet was so distinct, and because our ears weren’t constantly overwhelmed, we could understand it when lead singer Lajon Witherspoon sang, “Denial has left you, all alone.” Even if we couldn’t, you know, understand it.
It seems like an easy enough trick, but it is a trick that escapes most bands. Or more accurately, their sound engineers.
(Incidentally, Sevendust’s latest album, Cold Day Memory, is quite good, assuming that you’re like me and that you still occasionally need to lie on your bed and block out the world with the buh-buh-ba-ba-buh-buh of a heavy bass guitar.)
I understand the dilemma with which club owners and sound engineers are faced. Much of the time, the idea is to get the audience drunk and/or convince it that it is having “fun.” In that case, the easy answer is to turn up the volume. The manager at the Blue Hound Bar & Grill hopes that the co-catalysts of loud music and a Friday night special on Rumplemintz work like a well-built ‘Smore, creating a treat that is better than just the sum of its parts.
Or, the band might be a not very good one, leaving no recourse but a dialing-up of the volume in the hopes that a bump in amplitude will mask the band’s struggles with frequency. (A strange paradox, to be sure: when the band is bad, the volume goes up.)
But most of the bands I go to watch are neither bad nor the type that is built for wet T-shirt night. I don’t think anyone in the audience at shows by the National or Menomena or Bad Veins is planning to vomit that evening. Most of the time, the audience would be content with hearing good music presented in a way that doesn’t require earplugs and a careful examination of the stage to confirm that the band is using multiple instruments since it sounds like everything is coming out of one big guitarbasskeyboarddrummachine.
I don’t expect to confirm anytime soon my theory of what audiences want. Unfortunately, the Walkmen are the welcome exception to the rock ‘n roll rule: As long as there are drunk people at venues, the music will be too loud.
What I do expect is that I’ll see the Walkmen every chance I get. Their embrace of the midrange has made me a fan, and not just of their live work. Because I was able to enjoy their music in live form, their albums now sound better. Because the Walkmen sounded better at the Bottleneck, their latest album, Lisbon, sounds better in my kitchen.
And all because the Walkmen did something very un-rock. All because they turned the volume down.
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(In case you’d like to experience the majesty of well-modulated volume for yourself, information about the Walkmen’s current tour can be found on the band’s website.)
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And to think, this is the same band that played “The Rat” on Letterman and received the praise, “Wow! Play that in the morning to wake ya up!”
That song really is a musical mystery. Nobody knows where it came from.
I came to comment on “The Rat” also … as Hank says, a mastery of music.
I saw the Walkmen and Japadroids on this tour in Tempe with a buddy. He was a Walkman fan, but I was there for the opener. I had missed the JPNDRDS the last time they were in town, because I was at Coachella, and vowed to see them the next time they were in town. Their album “Post Nothing” was #2 on my best of 2009 list. This show occured only a few days after “Lisbon” was released.
I enjoyed the Japandroids immensely, but wasn’t feeling it for the Walkmen. My buddy was disappointed by the Walkmen’s performance too. Maybe they were having an off night.