The Walkmen A Hundred Miles Off Review

My first introduction to the The Walkmen was listening to this album while driving across Indiana with my sister on a dreary February day.  We hooked her iPod up to the car stereo, you know, so I could hear what the kids are listening to now a days.  (I'm only 2 years older than her, but I don't really follow rock/indie/"popular" music anymore, having gotten much more into electronic and experimental music.)  She DJ'ed for a while before putting this album on, which immediately caught my ear.

My first impression was that Bob Dylan was fronting a new band of younger musicians (in fact, I even asked her if she mis-tagged her MP3s).  Foremost, the singer has really taken on a lot of the vocal stylings and phrasings that are characteristic of Dylan.  Secondly, the whole album has a certain sprawling, loose grandness that immediately calls to mind Dylan's electric transition, especially the live tour scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's Dylan documentary No Direction Home.

It was this second fact that captivated me then and still does now that I purchased the album.  This album is more than just a collection of songs like so many others are.  Nor is it a concept album.  But there is this huge, raucous, energetic vibe that transcends the individual songs and unifies the whole thing.  The Walkman have made an Album, in a way that so few bands do now (or frankly, ever did).

I've only had this album for a week or two, but I feel like it's going to have the staying power to remain one of my favorite albums of recent years.  My only caveat for others would be that the Dylan-esque vocal stylings might be a turn off (1. if you plain don't like that style of singing, or 2. if you think it's too much of a rip off of good old Bob).