Hamilton Leithauser Ventures New with 'Black Hours'

When you do something new, you carry your loved ones and where you come from with you. Getting on the bus on your first day of school, losing your virginity, moving away, in your ambles your circle are a part of you and they are there with you. At a certain point though, what you're doing becomes different than what's come before. The plates tear away and the cookie mash of island pushes forward in new waters. Hamilton Leithauser is debuting Black Hours with a tour, a band, and songs that are supported by his longtime Walkmen partners, but makes a fresh cut. It's a half moon with many arrows of varied lengths that fan out as they shoot in different directions.

There's an About.com Alt Music interview from the era of You & Me where author Anthony Carew asks Hamilton about how he endeavors to do something different. Hamilton answers, "You don't. You do it in the same way, with the same five guys. Just because you know that you want to do something different doesn't mean you know how to. So you just have to keep playing and playing. You just hash it out, and wait until there's something that you all agree is exciting and different-sounding. It takes forever!" This time around, with the concoction for Black Hours, one imagines that Hamilton is still doing that cycling and churning, but in a more solitary way. The first singles from the collection, "Alexandra" and "11 O'Clock Friday Night" are romantic, classy, and upbeat. "Alexandra" is particularly hard-hitting, making you feel at times like you're the table when someone is banging on it. However, when Hamilton and co. revealed the rest last night at New York's Joe's Pub, they were a real mix and some got dark. Not even, honeyed tones of nostalgia like what we're used to with some signatures from the Walkmen, but pieces that feel like empty streets with longer cinematic pauses and pin drops, as you'll hear on "St. Mary's County." Not to say that the Walkmen didn't pull a knife slowly down through your heart. They always had patience to sculpt pathos theatrical, but Black Hours takes this trait forward. The meat of the album touches on different genres, sometimes blasting really hard, with walls of percussion on isolated songs, traipsing elsewhere into sunkist tropical with lots of xylophone on others, and cradling country here and there. At some peaks, the band went into tremors of psych-rock, which was unexpected given their long-cultivated precision.

In an initial aside, Hamilton noted that the band was a family affair, with Paul Maroon, Morgan Henderson, Nick Stumpf, Hamilton's wife Anna Stumpf, and more friends blasting and tuning with him. He said "looking around I realized I'm related to like, 60% of the people on stage." The whole crew was big, and my two new Irish friends sitting next to me, Sorcha and Eirinn, said they loved that the opening was like a clown car, with more and more people coming out of a too tiny vehicle. He was surrounded by his people, enmeshed in the group that had for so long built their body of work together. Then by the time Hamilton finished the last song from the encore, he looked at the crowd and it wasn't clear that it was going to be the end. He surveyed everyone, his head bobbled, and in the face of the timbered, suited man you saw a little boy peering to see if everyone liked what he had done. Hamilton balooned his cheeks as he looked nervously out, and saw that they did. He released and called it a wrap. He had done something new. In a fitting tailoring from the new album's "In Our Time," he had earlier belted:

Today's the day we start again /
If I don't look the same /
It's gotta be a good thing

Hamilton plays two shows at Joe's Pub again tonight, and then pops up in LA on May 5 before moving along on the rest of his tour. If you can't make it to the Joe's Pub shows in person, NY Mag's Vulture.com is livestreaming them later today at 4:30 and 7:30 PM EST.