It’s funny, if I were introduced to the music of Jeffrey Lewis for the first time today, I’d probably run a mile. His whiny, nasal voice, anxious confessional folk-punk stylings and quirky indie comic book sensibility… these are really not things I have much tolerance for in music at this point in my life. But, given that I’ve been listening to Jeffrey’s records and watching him playing consistently wonderful and engaging live shows for almost the entirety of my adult life, it’s safe to say I’m in for the long haul.

He is one of the constants, and getting a new album from him is like receiving an unexpected visit from a particularly energetic and charismatic old friend. You might get kinda frustrated as he potters about your living space, rambling on about things you have very little immediate interest in, but goddamn, it’s still nice to have him around.

As is par for the course with Jeffrey Lewis ‘solo’ LPs, ‘Manhattan’ is about 50% genius, and 50% inexplicable, head-scratching nonsense, so let’s keep things positive and concentrate on the former.

Opener ‘Scowling Crackhead Ian’ is excellent, one of the richest and most poignant songs Lewis has ever written, and as it drifts into the more abstract concerns of ‘Thunderstorm’, followed by the frantic, hollering abrasion of ‘Sad Screaming Old Man’, things are going very well indeed. The lengthy centrepiece track ‘Back to Manhattan’ is also beautifully realised and very affecting, and if much of side two rather fails to deliver (from my POV, at least), well we’ve still got a lot of great stuff to get stuck into here.

Crucially, I see the aforementioned songs as expanding the range of Jeffrey’s recorded material in two significant ways. Firstly, he is going here for a kind of ‘world building’ approach to song-writing (similar to something like, say, Lou Reed’s ‘Street Hassle’ or The Kinks ‘Muswell Hillbillies’) that I think works very well for him. By framing his autobiographical concerns within a broader picture of the people, places and memories that surround him in his New York home, he adds great depth to the material, largely managing to avoid the self-pitying solipsism that made much of 2011’s ‘A Turn In a Dream Songs’ such a chore, whilst still keeping his own observations and experiences centre-stage. Without wishing to sound too much like the pompous tutor in some song-writing masterclass, this is great work, and the best songs here are easily comparable to the level achieved by all those classic singer-songwriter LPs we love so much from the ‘70s, in spite of Lewis’s default jokey self-deprecation.

Secondly, ‘Manhattan’ also finds Jeffrey working out a rather lovely new sound around which to build his songs, with the best cuts here often bypassing his trademark assaultive strumming and/or shaky-fingered double-time picking in favour of a kind of cloudy, meditative psyhedelia, incorporating gentle organ sounds, droning reversed textures and ambient street recordings, often presented alongside some appropriately laidback Terry Callier/Jerry Garcia type noodling. Again, this suits the songs brilliantly – in fact it often sounds like Jeffrey has finally nailed the kind of approach he’s been searching for for years through his often slightly wayward psychedelic experiments, meaning that when he switches back to his conventional acoustic stylings, it often sounds quite jarring.

Clearly, we’re listening here to a guy who has little interest in reiterating the mutant nerd-punk blasts of old hits like ‘Time Machine’ or ‘..Kill the Ghoul’, and, whilst god knows he certainly doesn’t need another reminder that he’s getting a bit older these days, ‘Manhattan’s better half proves that – cough – “maturity” is beginning to suit him very well indeed. I can easily – almost inevitably, in fact – see him following in the path of those ol’ 70s 'cult' songwriter dudes [insert your preferred names here], spinning odd, frustrating, intriguing and secretly marvelous LPs out into the uncaring universe for many moons to come, whilst hopefully also continuing to rock the pants off us, in the, uh, “live arena” on a regular basis too [double checks start time for next week’s gig].

Jeffrey Lewis can be visited online here, and, being on Rough Trade and all, I’m sure ‘Manhattan’ can be located wherever discs are dealed.

Labels: best of 2015, Jeffrey Lewis