Can we get serious about the music industry for a minute? When we first got in the game, people always asked if it was like Almost Famous—you know how it goes down, the glamorous life of a writer must be jetting around the world with bands, learning about ourselves through their music, maybe even making lifelong friends with someone really famous. It’s not really like that very often, usually it’s some dude standing right in front of your face playing his guitar not that well, and that is cool sometimes but anyway, sorry to ruin the illusion dudes! Last night we felt a hint of that when we caught The Walkmen at Webster Hall. The band was tight and on point, performing pitch-perfect renditions of nearly all of our favorite jams, but keeping them dynamic and different enough that we didn’t feel like we were standing in a room with a bunch of people listening to their records. Mainly though, we felt like we were at a real rock show: audience members climbed posts for a better view, people were totally captured by the music. It’s a rarity to feel like you’re watching an actual show with all the right peaks and valleys and musical arcs, especially when most bands are a click away on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, and are often playing shows way before they’re ready. But The Walkmen come from a different era, when putting that kind of well crafted show was a given.
