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MUSICMay 19, 2006

Discography

Gentleman Collars: This time around, the Walkmen’s sweater-rock is too polite.

By Joe Warminsky

The official story of the Walkmen’s A Hundred Miles Off says the disc was recorded during a time of transition: Some members were relocating from New York to Philadelphia, the band’s once-exotic Harlem studio was no longer inspiring, there was a general outbreak of writer’s block, and everybody eventually chose to convene at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio with D.C. überproducer Don Zientara providing guidance. That’s a surprising admission of self-doubt coming from a band that’s always been about selling the swagger. On 2004’s Bows + Arrows, the D.C. expatriates (four of them are St. Albans grads) scraped all the right nerves, deftly mixing alt-rock smarts and last-drink angst. But on A Hundred Miles Off, they’re wanderers and collectors. The intelligence is still there, and so is the ring of vintage amps and roller rink acoustics, but so many of the songs seem incidental. The only significant stylistic leap is by singer Hamilton Leithauser, whose yelps owe more and more to Rod Stewart’s early-’70s earthiness. “Lost in Boston/Drinking rum and chocolate/A hundred thousand blinking lights/Are making me exhausted,” Leithauser hollers at the beginning of “Lost in Boston,” which has an assertively strummed guitar riff and a nifty bass breakdown about midway through. It’s one of the few songs with big hooks, even though it’s about a guy who is tired before things even get rolling. And it takes half the album to get to that point: The opening track, “Louisiana,” written pre-Katrina, has bar-band charm but not much else; “Danny’s at the Wedding” and “Good for You’s Good for Me” sound as resigned as their titles might suggest; and the organ-heavy “All Hands and the Cook” goes nowhere. The second half of the disc offers some release, thank goodness. The slow-builder “Don’t Get Me Down (Come On Over Here)” would be worthy of Bows + Arrows, “Tenley Town” is a credible nod to basement hardcore, and afterward the guys are less cranky and far more Kinks-influenced. The ballad “Another One Goes By” closes things out with a bit of showmanship, with Leithauser crooning lines such as, “Don’t know what to offer you/When I’m only broke and lonely.” But ultimately, like much of A Hundred Miles Off, it has the air of roteness. The real identity crisis is plainly within the band itself. Instead of asking, “Where do we go from here?” the Walkmen should have pondered another question: “How much of this stuff actually matters?”

The Walkmen perform at 10 p.m., Thursday, May 25, at the 9:30 Club, 815 V. St. NW. For more information, call (202) 393-0930.

Foucault’s Pabulum: His Americana may be bland, but it goes down smooth.

By Justin Moyer

For every Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen channeling Woody Guthrie, of course, there are a million marginally talented dudes embarrassing themselves in local coffeeshops. Jeffrey Foucault’s Ghost Repeater proves he’s not one of the latter, even if the Wisconsin-born troubadour sometimes courts cliché as much as his open-mic brethren. Maybe the weather beat it out of him: Foucault moved to western Massachusetts a few years ago, but he returned to the Midwest during a cold snap to record his third album with Bo Ramsey, Lucinda Williams’ former producer. Ghost Repeater evocatively captures the freezing, endless plains not far from the Iowa City studio’s door. The album’s title, a reference to the DJ-less radio stations that relay generic, preset playlists across the nation, introduces Foucault’s existential vision of a broken-down America. It’s elaborated in the lyrics he sings over the slinky chords of “Americans in Corduroys,” a tale of two lovers’ flight from and return to home: “[O]ur country rose to meet us in the air/With all its beauty and its lust/Its diamond teeth and heart of dust.” Ghost Repeater abounds with such dark imagery, with Foucault’s declaration in “Wild Waste and Welter” that “There’s killers on the road/They’re going door to door/With lamp black eyes/And the number on your soul” about par for the course. If you think that means Ghost Repeater is 11 tracks of Ghost of Tom Joad–style American Gothic, Foucault employs a full band, and its liberal use of Hammond organ and steel guitar (the latter courtesy of Son Volt sideman Eric Heywood) marks a smart departure from his minimal previous releases, Stripping Cane and Miles From the Lightning. But if Ghost Repeater is above-average, it’s far from iconic. Foucault’s lyrics can veer dangerously toward surface-level declarations such as “Everyone’s buying/What no one can sell,” and his baritone is a bit too achy-breaky for tasteful alt-country. Johnny Cash—OK, Jeff Tweedy—our man ain’t. Of course, that lack of distraction might be Foucault’s ultimate strength. Ghost Repeater is familiar and personal, the record the one really talented guy at open-mic night might have made. It’s proof that, unlike all those other guys, Foucault is sad because he wants to be.