The Walkmen
A Hundred Miles Off
Record Collection

It almost never fails - just when I'm ready to wash my hands of Listening To Everything as an active lifestyle choice, cursing my self-inflicted lot as a sucker's bet or worse, I stumble on something that's actually good. What's so good about this particular record, you ask? Hard to say. It's certainly not "original" - the singer sounds like he's been eating a steady diet of Basement Tapes for a decade or more and the musicianship doesn't exactly beat the rock thing into any unrecognizable shapes. The difference, kids, I'm afraid, amounts to admittedly intangible stuff like passion, conviction, ETC, which, since this is my blog, I'm allowed to proclaim is here in spades. The backing track of "Good For You's Good for Me" sounds like an overdriven Crickets guitar part with someone beating on a plank of metal underneath and a Bringing It All Back Home vocal outtake pinned on top like a birthday ribbon. And it works, somehow, unimaginable as that seems. There's also a song where they sing the phrase "lost in / Boston" and later assonantly rhyme it with "Exhausted."This, I submit, is the thing called rock. And if this is also where we part ways, I can accept that. Adieu, motherfuckers.