Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts
Manhattan
ROUGH TRADE
7/10
Jeffrey Lewis has long been a staple of the New York music scene, first cutting his teeth in the anti-folk circles alongside The Moldy Peaches in the late ’90s. His songs have always been as rich with the city’s colorful characters as they are his with incisive ruminations about his own life and philosophies, and Manhattan is no different—the super-charged neurosis of “Sad Screaming Old Man” details the hell of city apartments’ thin walls, while the jaunty and slightly off-key rush of “Outta Town” fools you into thinking it’s a break-up song before its comedic reveal. Elsewhere, “Support Tours” examines the difficulties of living an artistic life in 2015 and the spoken word(ish) track “The Pigeon” ends the album with a stream of Yiddish to reveal the true roots of the city Lewis is singing about—roots that have almost entirely been forgotten through the homogeneity of New York’s gentrification.
