There’s a beautiful melancholy, a soft and mesmerising sadness to The Walkmen’s "Lisbon" which stirs you completely.
Every time I listen, I place this album in California (which I know is slightly inaccurate given the band is east coast) – but perhaps it’s the flamenco guitar strumming of “Follow the Leader” or the relaxed progression from one song to another – but, to me, this belongs on coastal roads late at night curving around the PCH or late afternoon musing through the Napa Valley or daybreak in Laurel Canyon on a bend in the road looking out across the city.
The pleasure from the album is its easiness, it feels like everything is effortless and as a listener, you need only stretch back, place your hands behind your head and listen. There’s an elemental feeling to the album – as if it was all done in one take, and the band are playing live in your living-room. It’s like looking at a stained-glass window – in the moment, you appreciate its beauty but when you turn the thing over in your mind, you wonder at the hours of effort that went in to achieve such perfection.
The easiness, too, belies the tragedy of the album: it’s an album that contemplates love at the edges of the end, and what is to be alone. “Why does the rain fall cold?” While it flourishes in the melancholy, it is an optimistic album at heart and also looks forward to the better times: from Juveniles, a song that deals with infidelity, still hopes “I am a good man/By any count/And I see better things to come”. “Stranded”, with its Salvation Army-like brass band, states “You don’t want me, you can tell me / I’m the bigger man”, admitting defeat and walking away with a head held as high as one can.
“Angela Surf City”, the paean to a girl who has been lost, difficult to be with yet difficult to forget. I think it’s also a love song to Los Angeles – “Angela, what’s the difference? /Life goes on all around you.”
“Blue as Your Blood” has a poetic quality to the lyrics which bolsters or counterpoints the enthralling music – the guitar and drums are marching on to a stubborn, robust beat whilst the lyrics open an expansive train of thought and contemplate the sky. The guitars in “Victory” jangle and echo, yet the lyrics, delivered with a smoky, scratchy quality, speak of a hollow victory – “It’s all uphill for me”.
I love the surprises that these small details create – “All My Great Design” pauses about a third of the way through the world-weary, haunting end of relationship thoughts to offer “la-la-la”s which sound like they were delivered inside a cathedral. “Woe is Me” is nearly the most upbeat of the eleven songs, in that it gets your head nodding and your feet tapping, but the lyrics tell of the girl who got away, the memories strong and the wounds fresh: “she was my not so long ago.”
The last three tracks move from the bleakest track on the album, “Torch Song”, “I don’t have a clue / It’s a weight upon my empty skull” to the most contemplative, “While I Shovel Snow”. It’s as if all the pain that is generated in the head and heart of the former song, is exercised away by routine and the physical body in the latter. Both tracks finish elusively as if cueing in the final track, which carries the weight of the album, “Lisbon”. It takes a while to build, with gentle sweeping cymbals shuffling us in, but once it gets there it opens up panorama views of sound. It’s the song that brings together all the heartache but also treats the memory, the pain as lovely, as something worth cherishing. “The souls you love, the place you live / Those country houses / A change of heart tore us apart / Oh, what a ride”. Those beautiful horns re-join us at the end as the rest of the band plays us out and we are lost in commemoration.
It’s a beautiful, wistful and whimsical album that, despite being tinged with sorrow, gives so much pleasure, so much to be grateful for and to enjoy.
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