The Rat – The Walkmen
Digging back through the vaults a little bit for this one. I never mustered all that much enthusiasm for anything else from The Walkmen, but this song is absolutely stunning. It opens with a blistering guitar that’s joined by some drumming that would make Animal from the Muppets swell with jealousy. This is drumming that could singlehandedly violate the CTBT.
And it only gets more impressive when the vocals kick in. It’s a tightly-controlled fury, shaking with such force that the walls themselves begin to crumble in on top of you. For a while you wonder if the very fabric of reality is going to be torn asunder. But then, before you lose your mind a suffocating darkness envelops you. All that rage is enclosed, transformed into a stifling self-pity (“When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw. Now I go out alone if I go out at all”). And just as you’ve grown accustomed, the drums kick back in and blow apart the walls of the cage.
The final result is as venomous as it is striking. The sort of song that leaves you tense, expectant of some oncoming apocalypse.
Bows + Arrows came out the same year as Funeral which naturally invited some comparison. For a brief time I was claiming that the former was the better record. Looking back it seems obvious that the Arcade Fire are the superior band and Funeral a much more significant achievement. But there was just something about this song that tore down all my defenses in a way that’s still hard to fully explain.