The Walkmen – The Blue Route

These folks have done some good things in the past, suffering for their own brilliance with a song that everyone wanted to hear all the time and, four years on, is still like to get many an airing in your local indie disco. Unfortunately they still seem trapped in ‘04, unable to follow it up with anything of equal magnitude; the rest of that album was very good, but didn’t quite match up. Even the press release for this new single mentions ‘The Rat’ in “you thought that was good,” kind of a way. It was only ever going to end in disappointment, a silly manoeuvre akin to The Strokes pretending to have bettered Is This It (twice). I did intend to ignore the comparison here, but they started it…

‘The Blue Route’ starts off with some jangly guitars and a slightly un-melancholy feel which is nice enough but takes too long to really do anything. Then it happens and you’re still waiting for something else. The repeat of “What happened to you?” seems prescient as you start to worry for the sanity of a band releasing this as a lead single for their new album. We were promised fun, more positive stuff but this is neither, it’s distressed boredom in sound format. The song opens with the lines “Keep replaying through the days/And it brought you to this place,” which by the end of the song sounds like a warning to other bands to at least keep up to your own standards, or you’ll end up on ‘The Blue Route’.

B side ‘Canadian Girl’ passes by pleasantly enough, but by now the damage is done. A look at the charts shows that, if you’re willing to forgo self respect, it is possible to at least sell lots of records by becoming a bad copy of your former glory. The Walkmen though have tried to retain their indie appeal to create a bland song that is hopefully just a bad choice of single rather than an accurate advert for their album.