The Gaslight Anthem

So I logged onto Amazon today and in their recommendations, they threw me the band The Gaslight Anthem. Curious about the name, I clicked on it and started reading user reviews. Most called them a punk version of Bruce Springsteen with some Dropkick Murphys vibes so naturally I was interested. Listened to some samples and ordered the new one. Here's the title track "American Slang":

Some parts of it I like but all in all not my thing! I gotta say it is mostly the generic piss poor drumming that really kills it for me! Let me know how the rest of the album fares!

Drumming is about the last thing I listen for on an album so that doesn't bother me at all. I like the way the band homogenizes a bunch of different influences into a sound I haven't heard before. I can't think of any band I know that has quite the same sound.

I'll let you know what I think of the whole album.

I don't disect the drumming it just kinda jump out at me in a bad way! I do like the collective sound, drums not withstanding! I think the guitarwork during the verses is great! Very cool loose feel to it, but the little riff after the chorus is to cliche for me! The vocals don't thrill or hinder me! I do get the Punk Springsteen reference and there is an Irish sound as well! If this is the Hit Sincle i.e. poppiest song on the disc I may find more to like in the deeper cuts!

I'll let you know how the album is.

I really hear Springsteen in the vocals of some of the other songs I listened to; and it's the early Springsteen, the pre-Born In the USA stuff that I like.

That's good to hear! We have the same taste in Springsteen!

I like that song. I too am interested to hear about the whole album...

I'll let you know my thoughts once I hear the whole thing.

If nothing else, it's at least different from my usual listening habits.

speaking of outside listening habits I was interested in your opinion on these:

Rhinobucket - Then it Got Ugly (price $8.80)
Rhinobucket - Hardest Hit (price $7.62)
Rhinobucket - Pain and Suffering (price $9.87)

exact33 wrote:

speaking of outside listening habits I was interested in your opinion on these:

Rhinobucket - Then it Got Ugly (price $8.80)
Rhinobucket - Hardest Hit (price $7.62)
Rhinobucket - Pain and Suffering (price $9.87)

"Hardest Hit"? What's that? I know "Hardest Town" and that one is their best "reunion album". I thought Then It Got Ugly was disappointing and "Pain ANd Suffering" is basically the "Pain" album (which was my least fave prior to Ugly) with some unreleased tracks.

The ones to get are the S/T and Get Used To It but they're usually pretty pricey. I'd rank Hardest Town third behind those two.

Thanks. silly typos. I might just get that Hardest Town then.

Too bad you didn't get into Bucket a couple years ago. When I bought Pain And Suffering I gave my copy of Pain to Ult for nothing.

I also sent him a CDR of the other two. I'll burn the first two for you if you want.

Its funny this year because two bands I really didnt like at all finally clicked - AC/DC and Kiss. I like some of the AC/DC clones now too. Ill get Hardest Town and let you know. Thanks for offering the burns!

Did you ever pick up any Angels?

tohostudios wrote:

Did you ever pick up any Angels?

still working on that. My venture into glam has taken priority

exact33 wrote:

tohostudios wrote:

Did you ever pick up any Angels?

still working on that. My venture into glam has taken priority

Nothing should take priority over a venture into The Angels.

Here's a cheap (about $6 ppd) way to get an introduction:

http://www.amazon.com/Face-US-Version-Angel-City/dp/B0012GN06C/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1277597890&sr=1-3

aye aye general glam!! Ill add it to my blowitouthere order!!

I just read this reveiw:


What's American Slang? On the one hand, you could say it’s the poetry of hope, the nation’s real voice, the hardy truth unsullied by spin, the language of people let down by the American Dream, and the hot air of the politicians peddling it, salesmen practised in the grammar of deceit and dubious promise.

There’s merit also in the notion of American Slang as a reference to the diverse colloquialism of American music, the myriad vernaculars of the blues, folk, gospel, country, jazz, rock’n’roll, pop, soul, punk and rap and the single tongue in which they speak to the disenfranchised many, words and music at this point combining to lift embattled spirits, rally the troops.

American Slang is also, of course, the title of the third album by New Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem, the follow-up therefore to 2008’s The ’59 Sound, which reached out to fans of Bruce Springsteen in the same way as The Hold Steady, whose unshakeable belief in rock music as a rowdy salvation Brian Fallon’s band unswervingly share.

Because they are reckoned to owe so much to Springsteen, who famously put in an appearance with them last year at Glastonbury and was on stage with them again a few days later when he headlined Hyde Park, there has been a perhaps inevitable suggestion that American Slang will be The Gaslight Anthem’s Born To Run. The record, in other words, that will carry them into the mainstream after years of making-do and scuffling, playing anywhere that would have them and in earlier days less hospitable places, all the hard work about to pay off now in a possibly big way.

It remains to be seen, of course, where American Slang will take them, but they certainly sound here like a band going places in a hurry. American Slang is one of the most exciting rock’n’roll records since global warming hit the headlines. It’s an album of electrifying rapture, massive riffs, songs with verses that sound like choruses and choruses that sound, yes, like anthems, meant to be sung by multitudes. Listening to it, you can almost hear the stadium roar that played live these songs will likely inspire.

The ’59 Sound wasn’t exactly short of similarly communal moments, as audience sing-a-longs to many of its songs last year so noisily attested, particularly when the band played the NME Stage at Reading in front of a word-perfect crowd who were perfectly happy to sing most of their songs for them. Neither, it should be said, was their debut album, Sink Or Swim, which was likewise brimful of tracks that crude as they sometimes were still made you want to wave a flag or set fire to something and dance around it, possibly whooping.

American Slang delivers spectacularly on all expected fronts. Everything that was great about The ’59 Sound is here, but the sound is even bigger, epic without getting blustery. And there have been great leaps forward in production and the musical arrangements, which have greater depth, atmosphere and texture. Brian Fallon’s writing has moved on, too. Previously, he’s written descriptive vignettes, tales of teenage trauma, frustration and heartbreak, narratives about the lives of others.

There’s a great example of that here, a celebratory song about not forgetting where you’re from called “The Diamond Church Street Choir”, whose soulful, finger-clicking swagger owes much to the Van Morrison of “Wild Night” and “Domino” and a little to Mink De Ville, too. By and large, though, Fallon’s new songs are more personal than ever, in many respects the most autobiographical he’s written. In a general sense, they are about being who you want to be, not who you’re told you are. Songs like “Orphans”, “Boxer”, Stay Lucky” and “Bring It On” are about standing your ground, being true to yourself and what you believe in, sacrifice and hard work, a determination to make something of yourself that you may have been told you’d never be. They rail against the definition of self by others, the idea of knowing your place and staying there.

They’re a call therefore to a certain kind of insurrection – “Look what you started! I seem to be coming out of my skin,” he roars on the title track, which opens the album with the declamatory knell of “London Calling”. In many ways, they are about Fallon’s own sense of ambition, his career to date an example of where self-belief can take you, Fallon offering himself as an inspiration to others, as Springsteen and Strummer were an inspiration to him. And a consolation, too, when times were tough. “Only I can heal your wounds when you can’t go on, when you can’t go on anymore,” he sings on “The Spirit Of Jazz”, assuming a paternal role quite new to him. “Give me the children you don’t want to raise,” he sings on “Bring It On”.

Nothing irks Fallon more than the wasting of opportunity, the settling for easy options. “The Queen Of Lower Chelsea”, which has the strut of The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” and quotes also from the Stones’ “Some Girls” castigates the somewhat easy target of a rich young girl who squanders her life – “Did you grow up a good girl, your Daddy’s pride? Did you make all the right moves, take all the right drugs, right on time?” – but Fallon’s full wrath is exposed on the staggering “Old Haunts”. He clearly has no patience with rueful reflection, and is similarly impatient with the solace some people find in nostalgia for a time before life got tough, a yen for the safety of an usually imagined gilded past.

“Don’t sing me your songs about the good times, those times are gone and you should just let them go,” Fallon fairly rages. “And God help the man who says, ‘You shoulda known me when’. . .Shame, shame, shame, shame on you, you sold your youth away.”

At the time of writing, a broadsheet has just published a 2010 festival guide, which includes a witty feature on what bands will provide “the definitive fists-in-the-air anthem” this summer. They list U2, Guns N’Roses, AC/DC, Muse and The Libertines. But when at whatever festival they fetch up at in the months to come The Gaslight Anthem close out their set, as they surely will, with “We Did It When We Were Young”, whose haunted atmosphere, so redolent of The Clash’s “Straight To Hell”, also brings American Slang to a dramatic climax, everyone else might as well run for cover. This is the song everyone will be singing, in a language everyone will understand.
Allan Jones

Wow, that's pretty heavy praise. Almost every review I've read namechecks Springsteen, Van Morrison and The Clash. Sounds like a pretty original sound to me.

it has some tom petty in it too.

That reveiw was a 100 out of 100 from Britan's Uncut Magazine!

So...Do we have a ToHo reveiw yet?

yeah! Inquiring minds want to know!

criss3o wrote:

So...Do we have a ToHo reveiw yet?

It's a quirky release; one of those you have to be in the mood for. ESPN and This Week In Baseball have both recently used tracks off of it as highlight music.

Right now I'm hung up on the new Sister Sin but when I get bored with "metal". the Gaslight Anthem disc will be the first one I go to.

Hmmm...I like quirky!

So how is this holding up, ToHo?

I just borrowed this from the Library and I am liking it alot! Definately a Punky Springsteen or American Clash sound! I like the album tracks more than the single!