See I was playing a show down the road when your spirit left your bodyĪnd they told me on the front lawn, I'm sorry I couldn't goīut I still know the song and the words and her name and the reasonsĪnd I know 'cause we were kids and we used to hangĪin't supposed to die on a Saturday night 'Cause the chains I've been hearin' now for most of my lifeĪnd the chains I've been hearin' now for most of my lifeĪnd I wonder, were you scared when the metal hit the glass? I hope we don't hear Marley's chains we forged in life
When we float out into the ether into the everlasting arms I hope it's something quiet and minor and peaceful and slow Gaslight Anthem, “American Slang,” SideOneDummy Records, June 15.Well I wonder which song they're gonna play when we go Who knows, someday it might lead to a rock opera or an album of 12-minute masterpieces for now, the bursts of brilliance that make up this song cycle will more than fit the bill. Even as things wind down with the atmospheric closing track, “We Did It When We Were Young,” it’s clear that Fallon and company are still just getting started with their tales of the queens, “The Cool,” and the absent wives and dogs of “American Slang.” Tight as a drum, not a note is wasted - there’s a whole world encapsulated in that 35 minutes.
These are people who’ve suffered the direst emotional blows and still haven’t lost hope that they might someday soar.Īnd the music on “American Slang” certainly soars with them. One of the things I love most about “American Slang” is that the title is no accident - the album really does speak the language of America, both in its roots in early rock ’n’ roll and the urban sensibilities of the scrappy survivors it sings about. Fallon stretches too, hitting high notes both musical and emotional on tracks like “Choir” and the grungy “Old Haunts.” (There’s even a scary moment on the back-from-the-brink anthem “Boxer” where you think he might start rapping, but it passes quickly.) The songs continue the band’s downtrodden tales of lost wives and forgotten youth, with a newly evocative bent: “The steam heat pours from the bodies on the floor, down in the basement where the jackknives play,” Fallon sings on the soul-tinged “The Diamond Church Street Choir,” in a typical example of the band’s expanding lyrical palette. Songs like the title track, “Stay Lucky” and the driving, buoyant “Orphans” continue the blow-out-the-stops guitar salvation mode of their last CD, and “Bring It On” raises the stakes with a moodier build as Fallon offers to take on all comers for a lost love: “Give me the fevers that just won’t break, and give me the children you don’t want to raise,” he demands, in one of the album’s more striking couplets.
On “American Slang,” though, the band is much more than that, with the Joe Strummer influence clearer than ever as it mingles with shades of reggae, grunge and Ramones-era punk pop. But in Fallon’s raspy sincerity, his desperate images of heartbroken loners and crushed dreams and the band’s embrace of the power of rock ’n’ roll redemption, Gaslight Anthem is the current frontrunner in the battle of the Springsteen successors. Gone are the direct references to Springsteen lyrics and mentions of Mary and Janey that dotted The Gaslight Anthem’s breakout sophomore album, 2008’s “The ’59 Sound.” But that doesn’t mean the shadow of The Boss doesn’t loom large over the band's latest release.īrian Fallon and the Jersey boys that make up The Gaslight Anthem were always more Springsteenian in spirit than in practice, with Alex Rosamilia’s punky guitars and Benny Horowitz’s pounding drums making their three-minute songs more reminiscent of The Clash than of the E Street Band’s piano-and-saxophone epics. If there’s one thing “American Slang” isn’t, it’s a Bruce Springsteen tribute album.
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