As a singer, Leithauser has a singular expertise for posing the query, “What if Jon Bon Jovi spent his youth gigging at Brownies as an alternative of the Stone Pony?” He sounds down unhealthy in each music, although he comes throughout as a fortunately married household man in interviews, and sometimes what seems to be a healthful love music at first blush reveals a darker narrative at shut hear. You’ll hear “Off the Seashore,” which opens with Leithauser crooning, “Eleven years because you walked the aisle,” and suppose, absolutely this can be a tribute to the songwriter’s spouse, who co-produced the report? However no, it’s a memory sung by a narrator recounting his failed marriages and concluding, “Love is reasonable, like a paper plate.” Leithauser understands that fucked-up romantics make for higher songs than fortunately married males.
Like many albums recorded over a few years, at varied studios with completely different producers, This Facet of the Island can really feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. The Dessner-produced ballad “What Do I Assume?” is overstuffed—you may think about a greater model stripped right down to the demo-like sparsity of early Walkmen—whereas the self-destructive character examine “Completely happy Lights” might’ve been transplanted from Leithauser’s character-study album, The Loves of Your Life. Nonetheless, his ragged charisma holds all of it collectively. “I simply need you to like me the way in which I really like you,” he howls, recounting a doomed relationship from his youthful years, on the climax of “This Facet of the Island”—the island being Manhattan, the facet being the far Decrease East Facet, the place Leithauser then lived not removed from streets constructed, as he sings, “out of trash.” The identical island the place, as we speak, you may want a dinner jacket to see him sing. You may take the boy out of the rubbish, however his songs will all the time discover their method again.
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