Albums Of The Decade - 96. The Walkmen - Lisbon

96. THE WALKMEN - LISBON
In the year of 2016, I took a trip to Lisbon a few days before Christmas, during a three month long sabbatical stint, between moving continents - Asia to Europe - a mammoth step. I fell in love there, made a great accomplice also, drank cask-loads of wine, spent time looking at the water and witnessed a pigeon fucking up eating my pizza; as a seagull deservedly took away the crust.

The Walkmen, just on the turn of the decade, managed to craft a 1950's style homage to this most luscious of cities using horns and mariachis, amongst other dis-harmonic strings. Hamilton Leithauser plays on the binary oppositions of feeling fractured and repaired at once - and that's been the story of the last 10 years for me, especially the former.

At the time of writing, I'm currently listening to Heaven - the 2012 follow-up to Lisbon and it's more of a full-bodied work, than the stripped down nature of this aforementioned modern classic. The Walkmen, prior to this in decades past I'd seen as a support band, and occasional headliner on the live circuit. But with this installation into Spaghetti Blogonese's  hallowed Top 100, they're officially seen as outright champions.