It's almost unconscionably easy, upon close inspection, to pin exactly why group is so affecting; usually, any equivocation about the matter hints at a lack of that "upon close inspection" part. Don't swallow that "inexplicably this band manages to _____" crap, dear reader --should you see it, simply replace with "I'm lazy," or "I'm incompetent," and you oughtn't to be too far off the mark as to how seriously the reviewer has taken his job (hah! job --if only we were paid for this).

How terribly I digress, and how uncustomary for me to do it. Even so, now I shall continue my vice-ridden way by providing examples of the "finding-out-what-it-is," conjecture with examples extracted from that current hotbed of hot hot hipsters, that is, New York. For who better to compare to The Walkmen than their neighbors in the cooler-than-thou neighborhood? For the Strokes, the It that it is (you love that pun, you love it), is chic-anery and great fat sexy hooks. For Interpol, it's mod atmosphere and seditious bass work + Television-inspired guitar licks. For The Walkmen, it's honesty, hollowness, and great melody.

It's what makes The Walkmen such a great band to come home drunk to. Your benders are nightly fodder for them, they digest the midnight crises of love and hate that you undergo in these hard, flat-skied winters as easily as mashed potatoes. With gravy (to complete the incomprehensible analogy).

So you've stayed with me thus far. You're waiting for the real praise to spill. How's this: this was, starting out, one of the most disappointing albums I have ever heard.

Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it a great deal. I did. But (and all bands should take this to heart), don't you dare start off your album with a song as devastatingly powerful as "The Rat," and then, two songs later, follow up with such tightly melodic genius as "Little House of Savages." It'll keep your listeners in a fog of such hopelessly high expectation that you risk alienating them from the remainder of your album as a result of the pure immensity of two achievements. The feeling is akin to being hit on by a supermodel and being given a hotel room number, to come upstairs and find that it's just her cute friend who wants you, and most regrettably of all, she didn't have a threesome in mind.

Yet, I had to pause, and you should, too, take a deep breath, and then listen to the rest of the album, feigning, for the sake of fairness, ignorance of those two brilliant rockers --the rest of the album does reward, and greatly. Which is funny, because:

The bass work is close to nothing. The number of notes per melody is not 8-12, ala New Pornographers, but 3-6. Tempo changes are not plentiful. Innovation is scant (beyond the sound they already fairly surely nailed on their debut LP). The lyrics are neither especially profound nor especially developed. But the melodies are almost uniformly excellent, and some of them are downright devastating. The guitars ring with pagan melodic god-power. And the full, full heart of Bows and Arrows is so open that even should you doubt the honesty of The Walkmen, their straightforwardness will still knock you flat. Aboveboard as could be, with little to hide and less to try to show off, Bows and Arrows is not the album that's too cool for you, nor is it ever beneath you; it's your best friend hammered and saying everything, about the girlfriend he just broke up with, that has been welling up inside him and now floods out.

It is a fitting analogy. Your first encounter with that friend (The Walkmen) was sometime on a blank winter morning in 2002, when he seemed vacant, ambling, not-quite-all-together. Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone was a ghostly, often sprawling album, moving with the pace and sureness of a rear-wheel drive car in the snow. It eventually made it through its turns and straight-aways, but shakily, as if the Walkmen had gone through so much heartbreak and jaded circles that they could barely get through. It was a beautiful album, and one of my favorites of 2002, but it was also very obviously not nearly to the level of maturity that the group proves to have on this, their sophomore effort.

Just see if you can find that signature piano jangling in any of the first four songs. Opening demurely with "What's In It For Me," the group very consciously introduce you to the elements they're now more interested in working with --highly melodic and distorted guitars instead of reverbing clear tones, rough-edged organ instead of omni-present, spectral piano, and what ends up being some enormously creative and energized drumming instead of hazy time-keeping.

It's a smart move to start of the album at the pace that The Walkmen do --the shock of "The Rat," raging on its heels, will reverberate throughout the rest of the album. It is almost unquestionably, in my mind, the best song the group has recorded. The lyrics are heartrendingly simple and clear; "You've got a nerve to be asking a favor / You've got a nerve to be calling my number / Can't you hear me I'm bleeding on the wall / Can't you see me I'm pounding on your door." And then, in the tortured quietude of the blurred bridge; "When I used to go out I would know everyone that I saw / Now I go out alone if I go out at all." In anyone but vocalist Hamilton Leithauser's agonized pipes, these lines might quickly don the habillements of cliché and triteness, but he infuses them with such desperate openness, such unashamed heart-busting fervor that you feel the scars on your own soul and heart with renewed awareness. The melody of the song climbs through layers of chiming, breathtaking, sustained guitars, unleashed like warring angels. And in one extraordinarily artful moment, in the brief transition from the bridge to the final verse and chorus, the bass is held back for just one perfect moment before it charges in to complete the careening, blistering drive. But the real star of this piece of genius is Matt Barrick, whose merciless intensity and mind-boggling creativity at his break-neck pace on the drum kit is nothing short of jaw-dropping. On this album he will give the Walkmen, what, instrumentally, they needed most in their last: rhythm and focus.

What's changed here is not really specific skill (excepting Barrick); the complexity of the fretwork on the guitars, the fingering on the bass, is nothing more (in fact it might even be less, in some cases) than what it was on their debut LP. The single instrument that is remarkably more intense and improved is their drum kit, at times attaining a terrifyingly ferocious momentum. The difference is cardinally in the songwriting; in a word, it is one of the most impressive tightening shifts that I've seen any band make in recent history. It enables The Walkmen to rip into the beautiful melody of "Little House of Savages" --the only rocker here that I think really rivals "The Rat" --with unrestrained energy, guitars dueling to the high heavens while the drum kit hammers away, at times with restraint, and then mercilessly. The kick-drum blisters its way into the devastatingly beautiful chords of the chorus, while insistent keyboards stab inwards to the gut of the song.

Make no mistake --nothing here quite stands up to "The Rat," and "Little House of Savages." The Walkmen still have the room to improve and make a record that flattens the rest of the New York scene. But that doesn't mean you should overlook beautiful gems like, "138th street," a remarkably delicate late-night lament, chiming guitars and rising organs fading out, so that it's just Leithauser and a guitar carrying the heavy load on their backs for a little while. The other elements hesitantly step back in, and without moping past its welcome, the track closes itself out after just three minutes.

Much of the second half of the album might seem back a throwback to Everyone days, but all of the band's elements are far more neatly organized, even if quiet and slow-moving, like the ethereal "Hang On, Siobhan," which, despite its pace, is anything but aimless. The only weak track that I could immediately point to is "My Old Man," which, bordered on either side by "Little House of Savages" and "138th Street," seems pathetically weak and uninventive, its bass work staying on one note for almost the entire time, and its melody not nearly as strong as its neighbors. Plus, if the rest of the tracks on the album are at least as good as Everyone, it seems rather hypocritical to cast aspersion on the album for being as good as one of the best of 2002. Especially given the excellence of the organ-tinged chugging melody of "Thinking of a Dream," which, while somewhat similar to content on Everyone, is still one of the most impressive tracks they've recorded.

So while the album's legs are really "The Rat" and "Little House of Savages," the muscles built around them, dirge and mid-tempo alike, are mostly still admirable, and the obvious improvement on their sophomore effort couldn't be more marked. On "138th Street," Leithauser wails "Everyone will say you've missed your chance / Everyone will say you've lost your edge." The Walkmen seem to know a thing or two about missed chances; but as they prove here, with confidence, there's no way they're about to miss theirs. As every reviewer will expound at some point in his career, the sophomore effort of a great new band is often the most pivotal of all. Good for the Walkmen, because with theirs, these New Yorkers have managed to at once distance themselves from what's been inaccurately labeled their "scene," and make what will surely be one of the best albums of the year.