Written by: Alex Green
Tuff Sunshine’s Johnny Leitera has always been a bit of a linguistic force.
It’s hard to think of another singer/songwriter who not only plays with language as much as Leitera does, but also who does so with such tuneful results.
As the braintrust for the New York-based indie outfit Tuff Sunshine, for the past fifteen years or so Leitera’s been packing his CV with winning albums like Yesterday Suit and Fire In The Hero Building. His band’s new long player Vanity Matrix features Leitera’s peerless penchant for poetic phrasing, but the compositions don’t get delivered by way of acoustic guitars or sharp indie rock chords. The ten songs on Vanity Matrix are as catchy as Leitera’s past work, but this time around, they come laced with bedroom electronica and low-fi loops that add layers of texture to each number.
The title track is an opening salvo that features Leitera as linguistic as ever (“The liquid warms his throat/A protective coating/To justify his gloating/later or sooner sooner or later/Keen’s circadia a wrinkled copy of the auto trader/Lord do it slowly when you pull the fader”), but the song smolders with beats that swirl and slash with burning confidence across the track’s nearly three-minute length.
Later, “The Story Ends” is indie acoustica augmented by delicious musical diversions that crawl across the composition with bright flourishes; “I Will Meet You At The Bell” is a percussive winner punctuated by gentle instrumental discordance and the throaty whisper of “Wind It Up” is set against a scruffy tropical backbeat.
So yes, Leitera is experimenting on Vanity Matrix, but his excursions into new sonic territory yield nothing but gold.
The jaunty “Thank The Pilot/Suicide By Papercuts” builds into a spare psychedelic workout and “I Need A Hook” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Peter Case’s first album, but the album’s piece de resistance might very well be “All My Best Laps Are Behind Me.” Summoning the sentiments of Sinatra’s September Of My Years and Dylan’s “Simple Twist Of Fate,” “All My Best Laps Are Behind Me” is a devastating acoustic number that finds Leitera singing: “At first the medicine’s successful/You get that grin across your face/Then one day you see you’re not celestial/And you get slammed back into place.”
It’s an unflinching realization that the clock doesn’t go backwards but also that it doesn’t go forwards with any mercy, either. It’s hard to think of a song that better captures that liminal place where the past and the future look equally unattainable. Delivered with brutal but melodic honesty, “All My Best Laps Are Behind Me” is a stone-cold killer of a track. When Leitera sings: “Now I don’t mean to be a drag/And I appreciate you trying to find me/But I can see the checkered flag/All my best laps are behind me,” it’s hard not to reflexively take stock of your own life because, though we may be moving at different speeds, we’re all on the same racetrack.
