Hamilton Leithauser

The Loves of Your Life

The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser’s fourth solo album is unashamedly old fashioned.

Leithauser gives himself over to these real and invented memories, inhabiting them fully through specific, concise detail and imbuing them with a sense of hope and kindness.

Sonically ‘The Loves Of Your Life’ is a Wurlitzer whirlwind of nostalgia, however the glimpsed memories that lie at its heart are so charmingly dazzled to life - they are testament to the humanist eye of a songwriter as vividly inspired as he has ever been.

The Loves of Your Life is a collection of successful character sketches and a successful creative exercise for Hamilton Leithauser.

It’s a further breakaway from the great, dirty city sounds he helped revive in the early ’00s, but it lounges around the same subjects with a renewed and lighthearted sense of reverie.

Unlike many one-person projects, it never feels insular. In fact, The Loves of Your Life is often looser and freer than any of his previous solo work.

It may not have the immediacy of old Walkmen songs such as The Rat or Angela Surf City, but these stories of New York characters have a charm and subtlety all of their own, which is rewarded by repeated listening.

The former Walkmen member wrote each of these songs about a specific person, forming an archive of memories that comes alive in his elevated songcraft and dynamic voice.

Leithauser knows how far he can stretch both his songwriting and vocal talents, and The Loves of Your Life works best the closer we get to those frayed edges.