Album Review: Peter Matthew Bauer- Liberation!

One can read a lot into naming your album Liberation!—especially with it being your first solo album after spending more than a decade in a band. Because odd things stick out in my memory, I almost immediately likened it to the episode of the mid-90s TV show “Weird Science,” where the wish-of-the-week was for the guys to be in a successful rock band. They become one hit wonders, and one of them strikes out on a solo career with a single called “Alone Without The Baggage.”

Peter Matthew Bauer was a member of the much loved indie rock band The Walkmen who last year announced their break up “extreme hiatus.” And while their charismatic frontman Hamilton Leithauser released a somewhat tepid collection of croon-based material just last month, and mutli-instrumentalist (and family man) Walter Martin released an album of kids songs, it’s Bauer who picks up the torch, expanding on the sound that The Walkmen started with on their auspicious debut in 2002, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone.

It’s also been Bauer who has been the most vocal about his growing unhappiness as a member of The Walkmen, going on record in a Vice profile about how it stopped being fun, and kind of became a chore. And when their breakup was announced at the end of 2013, he was quoted simply as saying; “It’s been almost 14 years now. I think that’s enough, you know?”

One of the things that lead to the disdain within The Walkmen was how predictable things had become—the example he gave was that rather than just hitting record and experimenting with the organ should sound like on a song, the band spent twenty minutes arguing over it before they could move forward with anything else. By the end, the band had obviously matured out of their ramshackle, rough around the edges sound, but on Liberation!, Bauer attempts to incorporate a bit of that exuberance back into the music.

There are two underlying themes that tie Liberation! together: the first is heavy religious and spiritual ideas that are woven into the lyrics. And the second is that it is “worldly” album. Meaning that this isn’t “world music,” but it has an international influence (specifically India)—with evocative song titles like “I Was Born in an Ashram,” “Philadelphia Raga,” and then the instrumental piece “Istanbul Field Recordings.” But, in execution, this is a truly American effort, with Bauer copping some very strong young Tom Petty vibes at times, like on the excellent, fist pumping single “Latin American Ficciones,” as well as the album’s earnest closing track, “You Are The Chapel.”

In the Vice piece about Bauer striking out as a solo artist in the wake of The Walkmen’s demise, it says that Liberation! was written out of desperation and frustration—and going into it with that knowledge, you can hear a bit of that within the music, though desperation is a bit of a strange emotion to have with the first record you are releasing under your own name. There aren’t, like, Springsteen Born to Run levels of desperation and “go for broke” orchestration here, but even in the liveliness Bauer has attempted to recapture from his younger days, Liberation! is still a record made by an adult for other adults. It is also very deliberate in its loose, raw production value. Bauer’s vocals—less showy and “aim for the rafters” than that of Hamilton Leithauser’s—occasionally are mixed too low, getting somewhat lost in the shuffle of stomping percussion, and aggressive guitar strumming.

Exponentially more enjoyable from start to finish in comparison to Leithauser’s solo debut, Black Hours, Liberation! is a personal, and thoughtful effort, and it is the kind of record that should ease a little bit of the pain over the fact that there will more than likely never be another album by The Walkmen—even here, Bauer gives a little nod to the band’s early sound with the opening guitar riff to “Irish Wake in Varanasi.” It’s also the kind of record for those in a certain demographic that are looking for a “rock” album that is a far cry from “dad rock”—certainly not as widely accessible thematically as last year’s Trouble Will Find Me from The National (or even The Walkmen’s 2012 swan song Heaven), but Bauer is on the right track.

Liberation! is out now on Mexican Summer.