As a singer, Leithauser has a unique talent for posing the question, “What if Jon Bon Jovi spent his formative years gigging at Brownies instead of the Stone Pony?” He sounds down bad in every song, though he comes across as a happily married family man in interviews, and often what appears to be a wholesome love song at first blush reveals a darker narrative at close listen. You’ll hear “Off the Beach,” which opens with Leithauser crooning, “Eleven years since you walked the aisle,” and think, surely this is a tribute to the songwriter’s wife, who co-produced the record? But no, it’s a reminiscence sung by a narrator recounting his failed marriages and concluding, “Love is cheap, like a paper plate.” Leithauser understands that fucked-up romantics make for better songs than happily married men.
Like many albums recorded over many years, at various studios with different producers, This Side of the Island can feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. The Dessner-produced ballad “What Do I Think?” is overstuffed—you could imagine a better version stripped down to the demo-like sparsity of early Walkmen—while the self-destructive character study “Happy Lights” could’ve been transplanted from Leithauser’s character-study album, The Loves of Your Life. Still, his ragged charisma holds it all together. “I just want you to love me the way I love you,” he howls, recounting a doomed relationship from his younger years, at the climax of “This Side of the Island”—the island being Manhattan, the side being the far Lower East Side, where Leithauser then lived not far from streets built, as he sings, “out of trash.” The same island where, today, you might need a dinner jacket to see him sing. You can take the boy out of the garbage, but his songs will always find their way back.
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