This time last year hardly anybody had heard of New Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem, but when a hometown hero is one of your biggest fans you hardly need to do your own press. Twelve months after Bruce Springsteen himself joined the band on stage in London’s Hyde Park for a blazing rendition of single ‘The ’59 Sound’, the four-piece are gearing up for a sellout Glasgow show and their most anticipated album to date. And it’s a collection of lovers and fighters, old factories and sad ferris wheels; of drums that pound like a heartbeat and fingerclicks and “woah-oah-oah”s to roll the car windows down to. There are card sharks, fortune tellers, royalty and a broken-down old boxer. It’s both a lament to lost youth and the sound of impatient pacing in a doorway, waiting for real life to begin.
I’ve been told that breakthrough album The ’59 Sound took the knowing winks to the band’s record collections a little too far – that it played out like a kooky tribute to the point that their own ideas were lost under a pile of references to Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis. But unless the “hatful of rain” in ‘Orphans’ is a reference to our own Del Amitri, lyrically at least American Static marks an evolution from its predecessor. “Were your records all you had to pass the time?” Brian Fallon asks his lonely ‘Queen of Lower Chelsea’, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch to suspect it’s his own childhood he’s singing about.
In fact, it’s an album that works on two different levels. Taken at face value the Gaslight Anthem celebrate a world where the girls are cherry bombs and it’s always 1954. But look beneath the surface and it’s more autobiographical than it seems – not least in the ‘Boxer’ of the album’s midpoint, repairing metaphorical wounds with ink and classic rock radio.
Listen, I get why people hate this band. Skinny boys in tattoos and a frontman just pushing thirty, lamenting the Good Old Days when “my teenage heart pumped all my misery to fingertips that might ignite” kinda seems a little hard to get behind. But hey, I’ve just turned 28 myself and nearly every day feels like a Bruce Springsteen lyric playing tribute to the excesses of my lost youth. It makes me want to hear the Gaslight Anthem’s stories in twenty years time. I wonder if they will still overlap my own.
Somebody asked me recently what it was about these guitar bands from across the pond, with their songs packed full of highway-sized chords and references that mean nothing to a wee lass from Paisley, that I found so appealing – I suspect it’s as simple as there being a bit of the American dream in all of us. American Slang isn’t going to be for everybody, but if you like your rock ‘n’ roll big and ballsy and your heroines to be fallen angels you’ll find plenty to love in this release.
