Favorite Albums of All Time : The Walkmen - Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone (2002)

Favorite Song: Wake Up

Favorite Lyric: "They're winning, I know it's not fair, but what is? I'm giving up hope. I've stood in line so many times. How could I do it all again?"

Why?: The Walkmen are a band that strike a chord with me unlike any other. Hell, the title of my blog is the title of one of their songs. The songs on their debut "Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone" are without a doubt the band at their most simplistic and stripped down, and that is what I love about it the most. I feel as if each of their albums suit me for different mood, albeit they are always ho-hum sort of depressed moods at vary levels. The Walkmen's songs exude sort of an honest pessimistic optimism (if that makes any sense) that can just make everything in life seem alright, as self destructive as that sounds. It's an approach, that for me at least, is one of the most honest, down to earth and real things I've heard a band do in the past 10 years or so, it's unmatched. They tell life how it is, no bullshit, in the most poetically, disturbingly accurate way I can imagine. All this talk of the songwriting though isn't meant to overshadow the incredible beautiful music that accompanies it all. It's simple, sparse, haunting, and really does transport you back about 60 years, back to a time that seems a lot simpler and real. Hamilton Leithauser's voice is chalked full of drunken swagger and slurring, and it's perfect for stories he's telling; their ones you can see yourself sitting around drunk rambling on about with good buddies, songs about love, boredom, reality, and the confusion and frustrations of life. Everything down to this albums title is damn near perfect and relevant to me, it really is my favorite album of the 2000's by a long shot.

I really enjoy this snippet from Daytrotter.com about the band, they can describe what I'm trying to say here a whole hell of a lot better. Later on in the article they go on to compare the band to Leonard Cohen, which I have to completely and whole heartily agree with.

The Walkmen walk and shuffle and juke, their music a corpus of deft reflections of man through the centuries - the dotted line that has met us here from somewhere far off in the distance, only to connect with a new, side-winding or nascent other dotted line on the other side of here. They follow, in both tune and lyric, the never-ending travels of man - no one in particular and no one of any significant importance - just man as he stumbles about out the doors every waking day and finds mischief, confusion, romance, fogginess, temptation and potential enlightenment brewing like a stew before his nose. They seem to subscribe to the idea that you learn something new every day while there are holdovers in the procession of inference and critical processing, of actually digesting those valuable lessons that come with difficulty.