SONG: "The Rat" - The Walkmen (Bows & Arrows, 2004)

Some songs make little impact upon first listen and slowly wheedle their way into your subconscious over time. Others give you teasing fragments to grab onto while suggesting that you might become more familiarly acquainted given a little perseverance. Some songs, however, cut out the pussyfooting altogether and just go straight for the jugular.

The Rat is one such tune. A chunnering minor chord signals the arrival of its urgent opening bars; a thunderous beat then kicks in and rolls all over itself before a lonely guitar adds subtle shades of melancholy and the vocals eventually roar to life. “YOOOOOOOOOUUUU’VE GOT A NERRRRRRVE TO BE AAAAAAASSSSKIN’ A FAAAAAY-VUH!” frontman Hamilton Leithauser howls in a ferocious drawl; “YOOOOOOUUUU’VE GOT A NERRRRRRVE TO BE CAAAAAAALLIN’ MY NUMMM-BUH!”. It’s as abrasive as a sack’n’crack-wax with superglue and sandpaper, and about as subtle as a boot to the groin.

Formed from the ashes of The Recoys and esoteric art-rockers Jonathan Fire*Eater, Washington-based five-piece The Walkmen stormed into the public consciousness midway through 2004 with this incendiary firecracker of a debut single. Clearly aware of being pigeonholed as one-hit wonders by a song which ended up transporting them onto Letterman and The OC, the band quickly began disposing of it early on in their live set in order to focus the audience’s attention on the rest of their oeuvre. However, while there’s no faulting the ruthless conviction of songs like Little House of Savages and My Old Man, they’ve never bettered this - The Rat is the kind of song that grabs you firmly by the bollocks, ruffs you up against a wall and then proceeds to bludgeon you about the head with its searing, white-hot, all-consuming rage.

Leithauser doesn’t so much sing about the messy aftermath of a broken relationship here as scream blindly at you in the hope that some of his hurt might rub off and he won’t have to feel it anymore. He’s pissed off, he’s angry, he doesn’t understand how such a terrible thing could’ve happened. When you listen to the vocalist picking his way through the wreckage like the dazed victim of a car-crash, you’re hearing the sound of a man searching desperately for answers and finding only pain. “When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw / Now I go out alone, if I go out at all”, he moans when the song finally calms down for a brief moment midway through, before it kicks back into life for one final bout of increasingly fraught anguish. His resolve finally broken, the song ends – suddenly, inconclusively - with a solitary drum beat echoing out over a desolate squall of organ feedback.

I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I heard this record: it made me snap back in my seat and cry “Bloody hell…!” with a look of simultaneous horror and admiration at the sheer intensity of what I was hearing. Much more than a mere exercise in catharsis, this is music as emotional blood-letting – and, best of all, with its whirlwind disco beat you can really dance to it. I caught The Walkmen’s set at Glastonbury a couple of years ago and was more than a little alarmed to see Leithauser’s veins bulging out of his neck as he stared wide-eyed into the distance and spat vitriol into the mic as if it had scorned him personally. Sometimes I doubt if he was even aware of the audience being there at all.