Le Vinyle Club Vinyl Le Vinyl Club I Had A Dream That You Were Mine - Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam

Hamilton Leithauser & Rostam - I had a dream that you were mine

Thank you,
Thanks to my discerning and sensitive music-loving friends from Le Vinyle Club for asking me to review a record featuring my idol, my hero, the man I would want to be reincarnated as if reincarnation is waiting for us around the corner: Hamilton Leithauser.

“But who is this guy? There he goes, Bensé has lost it,” I can hear you swear from my couch, still tingling from the discovery of another gem from my favourite New Yorker. Leithauser is the singer and leader of The Walkmen, and fearing I’ve already exhausted my supply of superlatives for this man, I will only mention one album name: You & Me.

Back to the subject, who is Rostam? Rostam Batmanglij, a multi-instrumentalist songwriter and co-creator of the brilliant Vampire Weekend. After three flawless albums with the band, and various collaborations (Frank Ocean, Santigold, Dirty Projectors, Cass McCombs…), the virtuoso with a superhero-like name from Iran and the charismatic singer with prominent veins (if you see him perform live, you’ll understand…) are warming each other up at the start of 2016 and putting together this project that your devoted servant has the honour of presenting to you.

“Afro Doo Wap,” “Calypso Blues”… call it what you will, this collaboration between two of the greatest souls of alternative New York in the last fifteen years.
Throughout the album, haunted upright pianos, Dylan-esque harmonicas, Leithauser's reverberated voice, steel drums, organs, distorted drums and Rostam's harpsichords blend together without ever overpowering each other, as shown in the sublime “You ain't that young kid,” a gem with more than 5 minutes of movement (cool!).

Time passing, memory, the terrible Instagram filter that yellows the images of an eternal Big Apple, are recurring characters in this grand cinematic phonogram.
Thus we understand the video for the inaugural “A 1000 times,” and this group of children in Proustian avatars of Leithauser. “I retired,” he sang two years ago, a prophetic song or a lucid observation of a 40-year-old man on the relentless youth culture of millennials and their younger peers?

How hard it is to last in this world, and Leithauser screams in the shadows his farewells to his former life, to his ghosts dressed to the nines by Rostam. The historical group of the singer had offered him its finest velvet, and Hamilton, the raw diamond, now turns to more sophisticated settings, while radiating with his unmatched original brilliance. And the duo chooses eternity over the present, fully aware that “Being in the wind means sharing the fate of dead leaves”...

Listen to “In a Black Out,” and watch the Werewolf Leithauser dance hand in hand, around a twilight fire, with Leonard Cohen and the eerie children’s choirs of Mozart, Requiem for The Walkmen. You might even kiss your loved ones in 2017 to the sound of the final 1959 and its chiaroscuro Doo Wap, enhanced by the spectral voice of Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors).

Go ahead, place the diamond on the groove, dim the lights, close your eyes and immerse yourself in this ode to lost memory, found for the duration of a record, the ideal soundtrack for your budding year.

And thanks again Le Vinyle Club, looking forward to next month…

Julien Bensé