The Walkmen - Heaven

It can be strange to hear a band you’ve followed for years begin to grow up and grow happier – particularly when that band have made a career out of providing you and countless others with bittersweet, desperate sing-alongs like ‘Thinking Of A Dream I Had’, ‘In The New Year’ or ‘The Rat’. Potentially, this can be as unnerving as meeting up with someone you knew five or ten years ago to find they’ve somehow acquired a house, a partner, maybe children – it can be difficult to reconcile an uncertain past with a more settled future.

The Walkmen know this – the whole of their new album, the patient, contented, reflective, aware Heaven, is a rumination on the past and the present, on how lives unravel and change and end up in places you’d never imagined. Opener ‘We Can’t Be Beat’ is the perfect introduction – built, initially, around an acoustic guitar, vocal harmonies and Hamilton Leithauser’s unmistakable voice, it’s a gorgeous, poignant song about reveling in the moment, but realizing how much has brought you there: “Golden dreams, all lose their glow/I don’t need perfection, I love the whole”. As the rest of the band, makeshift percussion and all, join in, it’s difficult not to be a little bit moved by it all.

In the past – at least up until last album Lisbon – albums by The Walkmen could be a little cold, a little difficult to enter into. By all means, when you’d cracked through their initially slightly unwelcoming facades – revealing the sheer intensity of Bows And Arrows or the relationships falling apart and coming together again on the phenomenal You And Me – the music became difficult to shake off, and it clung to your own chilly, drunken nights or moments of self-reflection. But Heaven is so lushly and painstakingly produced that it comes as a shock to be welcomed in from the off – ‘Love Is Luck’ sounds like The Walkmen of old but richer in sound and less frigid, less intense, while ‘The Witch’, all stabbed organ and ferocious drumming, finds certainty in uncertainty, with Leithauser listening to country music in his car, thinking “Love will decide”.

You can’t remember the band ever sounding so relaxed, so happy to just let things be, even when things aren’t going so well – on ‘Line By Line’, Leithauser sings “I just know it … We all scrape by” over arpeggios that crescendo brilliantly, simply.  Ten years ago, the same emotion might have been poured into something like ‘The Rat’ – instead we get two graceful build-ups and wordless “la-la-las” from Leithauser on the outro. This contrast is reflected in much of the rest of the album – The Walkmen have become a much more cerebral and tightly-focused band in 2012, content to embrace contradictions rather than rail against them.

This is perhaps best illustrated in album highlight and title track ‘Heaven’ – propelled, as ever, by Matt Barrick’s drums, it’s as anthemic as the band have ever been, with Leithauser hollering “Remember, remember/All we fight for” through the chorus. It sums up the feeling that you get throughout the whole record – that the Heaven that this band are writing about is built on coming through all the bad times, as much as it is celebrating the good. As a result, and despite the passing of time, The Walkmen remain a band easy to identify with, live with and, most importantly, singalong to.