The Walkmen

David Byrne once described heaven as a place where nothing ever happens. The heaven Hamilton Leithauser sings about in the title track of The Walkmen’s seventh album is a similarly uneventful place, and he’s willing to fight to keep it that way. Over a robust power-pop melody played on ringing guitars and driven by a rhythm section that hits like a life-or-death concern, Leithauser pleads for family stability, asking that “his best friend” never leave him, so that “our children will always hear / romantic tales of distant years” as they grow old together. It’s hardly a sentiment anyone would’ve expected from The Walkmen a decade ago, when they started out as young, hard-drinking New Yorkers out for a good time on 2002’s Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone. On Heaven,they’ve left that behind for lives that that are quieter, straighter, and a lot scarier.

Updated 06/19/2012