As a singer, Leithauser has a singular expertise for posing the query, “What if Jon Bon Jovi spent his childhood gigging at Brownies as a substitute of the Stone Pony?” He sounds down dangerous in each tune, although he comes throughout as a fortunately married household man in interviews, and infrequently what seems to be a healthful love tune at first blush reveals a darker narrative at shut hear. You’ll hear “Off the Seaside,” which opens with Leithauser crooning, “Eleven years because you walked the aisle,” and assume, absolutely this can be a tribute to the songwriter’s spouse, who co-produced the file? 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 totally different producers, This Aspect of the Island can really feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. The Dessner-produced ballad “What Do I Assume?” is overstuffed—you can think about a greater model stripped all the way down to the demo-like sparsity of early Walkmen—whereas the self-destructive character examine “Glad Lights” may’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 like you,” he howls, recounting a doomed relationship from his youthful years, on the climax of “This Aspect of the Island”—the island being Manhattan, the facet being the far Decrease East Aspect, the place Leithauser then lived not removed from streets constructed, as he sings, “out of trash.” The identical island the place, at the moment, you may want a dinner jacket to see him sing. You possibly can take the boy out of the rubbish, however his songs will at all times discover their means again.
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