The Gaslight Anthem American Slang (SideOneDummy)
3/5
By: Matt Tomiak
The Gaslight Anthem's sophomore album The ’59 Sound was, strictly speaking a 2008 release, but following this New Jersey quartet's profile-boosting Springsteen support slots and Glasto guest appearances in the summer of 2009, it suddenly exploded.
Rarely has a record appealed to as many disparate musical tribes as this exuberant offering: as accessible to youthful punk rockers as it was to long-term lovers of The Boss (indeed, the title track was featured on a compilation last year alongside My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco), it was an album steeped in The American Dream, referencing Elvis, vintage Hollywood stars, bar room pipe dreams, lonely diners and the enduring appeal of the open road. Just as Bruce’s magnum opus Born To Run offered a glimpse of escapism and salvation to the economically depressed post-Vietnam/Watergate America, The Gaslight Anthems’ cars and girls-centric rock n’ roll classicism offered timeless respite from the innumerable societal ills of the late noughties.
If anything, American Slang is even more one-paced than its predecessor, and Brian Fallon's lyrics still at times appear to have been assembled via a Springsteen Magnetic Fridge Poetry Kit, but at least The Gaslight Anthem aren't aping their prime influence’s' biggest hits. The garrulous urban slice-of-life 'The Diamond Church Street Choir', for example, harks back to the Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. era rather than the unit-shifting behemoths that followed.
Very much a case of more of the same, then, but The Gaslight Anthem can still get away with it, so buoyant is their Jersey Shore idolatry. Up until closer 'We Did It When We Were Young', that is - a dispiriting, calculated Killers-ish climax; a lighters aloft plodder which ends American Slang on a bit of a downer.
Artists in this article: The Gaslight Anthem
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