Music

It’s hard to imagine two souls less patently twinned than Bob Dylan’s and Julian Casablancas’s but, with this quintet, it’s as if they’re conjoined heart to heel. The Walkmen feature three former members of Jonathan Fire*Eater, whose stylish, organ-stoked, garage-rock racket first appeared a good six years before The Strokes, but proved to be a case of right sound, wrong time. After that band’s demise, the three hooked up with two old pals from Washington DC and released The Walkmen’s first album in 2002.

‘A Hundred Miles Off’ is their third LP and is as coolly attitudinal, clamorous and sexily energised as anything by The Strokes, albeit leavened by plangent piano and lap-steel guitar. Vocalist Hamilton Leithauser must take much of the credit, since it’s his anguished yammering (think an alt.country Casablancas crossed with a less bone-dry Dylan) that sets the tone for the dozen songs here: ‘Brandy Alexander’ might have The Strokes changing the locks on their studio door, were it not for those quasi-calypso cross-currents; the full-tilt ‘Tenleytown’ betrays the band’s DC hardcore roots; and swooning closer ‘Another One Goes By’ suggests Dylan joining the Arcade Fire for ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’. Unlikely bedmates, maybe, but fine offspring.