Hamilton Leithauser - This Side of the Island Review
Eight years in the making, Leithauser’s latest album weaves political unease, personal reflection, and a return to electric guitars into a rich, evocative soundscape.
When Hamilton Leithauser began writing This Side of the Island, Barack Obama was the president of his country. In the same year Obama was elected, Leithauser’s band, The Walkmen, released You & I which featured the single ‘In The New Year’. Though the narrator of that song was somewhat deluded, imagining a world where his sisters were married to his best friends, it captured the unabashed optimism Obama’s election was met with “We won by a landslide / our troubles are over”. But by the time Leithauser was ready to release the titular first single from this, his fourth solo album, Donald Trump was preparing for his second term in the White House. For this darkening political picture, Leithauser uses a failing relationship as a bleak metaphor. The song builds from a tentative windchime like sway into a stirring final third complete with drums and horns, as the singer pleads in his distinctive voice, that often oscillates between wail and croon, “I just want you to love me the way I love you.”
It is the only song on the album where Leithauser’s anxieties appear to get the better of him. The narrator on ‘Happy Lights’ sounds so carefree that you might miss the fact he is telling a story about taking and trashing his parents’ car. On ‘Burn the Boats’ Leithauser falls in love at a party and repeatedly says “I wanna go home”, yet the warming “do-do-dos” suggest that staying isn’t all that bad. When he tells the subject of ‘I Was Right’ “You’re gonna love me again”, it sounds like the reconciliation was never in doubt.
Leithauser has tended to keep electric guitars out of his solo work, preferring finger-picked folk and full blooded rhythm to carry his voice. But their return on this record, a decision Leithauser credited with helping the album make it over the line, gives the album its most carefree moment. With its swinging guitars and drums that sound like popcorn bursting in a pan, ‘Knockin Heart’ is a hit and if there was any evidence Leithauser was at all influenced by The Walkmen’s 2023 reunion tour, this is it. Elsewhere the guitars are tight and knotty, providing a gooey coherence to an album that throws in a coiled up rhythm section and sporadic jazz influences.
In the eight years Leithauser has been working on This Side of the Island, his friend Aaron Dessner of The National has become a renowned producer. Seeking a second opinion on the album’s completeness, Leithauser visited Dessner who added his own flourishes to the album and gave it a bigger, modern sound. Completing something that was eight years in the making must have been a relief to Leithauser. But if he is to find optimism that the anxiety caused by his country’s politics is temporary, he could listen back to The Walkmen’s You & I. Nestled in the middle of that record is a tantalizingly hopeful thought - though some Christmasses are black and blue, that doesn’t mean the next one can’t be white.