Pitchfork

For a band that sings about aging out of the scene, the Walkmen drew an awfully young crowd to the Cat's Cradle. At least, that's how it appeared from my usual corner of the stage; maybe I just haven't yet learned to slouch calmly in the back with the other moldy oldies. At any rate, the skewed demographic allowed my friend Micah, who's basically the Walkmen's biggest fan, to twist off such award-winning puns as "You've got a nerve to be playing your new songs" and "When I used to go out I would know everyone that I saw; now when I go out, the only dude I know that I didn't bring is the Pitchfork reviewer." To which I'd add, "Everyone who pretended to like me is working a desk job and coming around to Coldplay."

Yeah, getting older's a bitch, but the Walkmen are doing it with grace, and their set, which included a batch of new songs that were good enough to maintain momentum, was bookended with familiar hits. One lapse in consistency: One of the new songs was as close as the band has come to hardcore, and while all the screaming and thrashing was weird in concert, I'm holding out for the album version to decide. If there wasn't any friendly banter, neither was there any forced distance, and the Walkmen rode their shimmering peaks and lulls with aplomb, energy, and understated showmanship. There was Hamilton Leithauser in an off-white Don Johnson blazer, holding the mic in his hand MC-style, suavely propping one foot on the monitor like young Hemingway posing on a tree stump. The entire band resembled college lettermen slumming it, but in a good way.

Throughout the engaging set-- the woozily cascading "Little House of Savages"; the ferocious gallop of "Thinking of a Dream I Had"; the stuttering vamp "Wake Up"; all the humming Farfisa and jingling sleigh bells and the weird rattle that appeared to be a gigantic gourd with a skirt of sea-shells (stolen from Architecture in Helsinki?)-- through all this, one burning question tacitly hung over the room: Were they going to play "The Rat"? Walkmen, consummate showmen that they are, held it until the last song before the encore, and then tore into it like they hated it (by now, maybe they do). Everyone went insane; there's something to be said for delayed gratification. The starry haze of "What's in It For Me" was an ideal encore, a gentle return to orbit after the runaway shuttle of "The Rat". Another friend of mine complained about Leithauser's lack of interaction with the band, but to me, that's part of the appeal-- they created the glittering space; he was the lost astronaut floating though it. It's an apt visual metaphor for being cast adrift in places that once felt like home.