Guitars, Drums, Tones, and Saxophones

The Gaslight Anthem - The

If you’re at all tuned into the punk world, this has to have been one of the mostly hotly-anticipated releases of 2008, perhaps second only to the new Dillinger Four record.

And with good reason; in 2007, New Jersey’s the Gaslight Anthem delivered one of the year’s surprise hits with their debut LP, Sink or Swim. As I understand it, they had no recorded output up until that point, so their acclaim had come based solely on word-of-mouth and a killer live show. Then the album dropped, and it sent shockwaves through the scene. They capped off 2007 by opening for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones on night 1 of the 10th Hometown Throwdown in Boston, MA.

So, with one quick stop at the Señor and the Queen EP released earlier in the year, that brings us to August 2008, when the band unleashed its sophomore effort on the world. And it would be fair to say it took the punk world by storm, and breached into the mainstream; they became the first band to appear on the cover of Kerrang! magazine without a single word having been written about them previously. Other mainstream publications began to take notice; the band was even written up in the New York Times.

All this acclaim was with good reason. The band took their New Jersey punk anthems, mixed them with the soul influences we all knew they had, turned down the distortion, and wrapped that music around the colorful stories that characterize singer/guitarist Brian Fallon’s lyrics; songs about love, death, music that gets you through the bad times, and girls named Maria. The lyrics are strong, and make for great, sing-a-long choruses in a live setting or in your bedroom. The stories he tells are filled with young men and young women, seeing each other despite what her parents think of him (“Miles Davis & the Cool”), or sitting in the diner with a cup of coffee, waiting for the girl who never shows (“Here’s Lookin’ At You, Kid”). Even if you haven’t been there, you know the emotions, and you can feel those emotions in Fallon’s voice. The lyrics are universal, if perhaps stuck in a certain time and place; there are no modern references in these lyrics, no iPods or Internet. In the aforementioned “Miles Davis…,” the protagonist summons his love to the window not with a phone call or a text message, but a stone, tossed up at her window.

The album is amazingly solid; no sophomore slump here! Every song is extremely listenable, and it’s the kind of album that gets better with subsequent listens. And you could even call it a crossover album. It definitely attracts a non-punk audience as well as the punks who were fans of Sink or Swim.

I can’t recommend this album highly enough. One of the best releases in 2008. To get a good feel for the album, I recommend checking out the tracks “Great Expectations,” “The ’59 Sound,” “High Lonesome,” “Miles Davis & the Cool,” or “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Yeah, I know, like half the album.

Oh yeah, and “Casanova, Baby!” as well. I’m telling you, it’s all really good.

Rating: 5 stars

Note: if you get the album via iTunes, it comes with a bonus track, a cover of “Once Upon a Time” by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise. It caps off the album well. If you buy the CD, you can find the track online just about anywhere.

Tags: the gaslight anthem