The Gaslight Anthem
The '59 sound

THE REVIEW

At the service station of the long American highway that leads from Kerouac's "beat generation" to Barack Obama's new American dream, you might encounter these four American guys, the last dreamers in a land grounded by a decade that was supposed to embody the future but instead turned into one of the worst in USA's history.

"The '59 sound" is a significant title to understand where the New Jersey band's imagination stopped. Before everything happened, when a car, a radio, and the girl sitting in the seat next to you were freedom.

Brian Fallon, the tattooed leader of the Gaslight Anthem, does not hide his influences; on the contrary, in a game of quotes and references, he makes them public. Thus, from the lyrics emerge Miles Davis, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Elvis, Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. However, while they are so mainstream in the lyrics, they are somewhat less so in the sound, which veers toward the punk'n'roll of the Clash of London Calling, the forefathers Social Distortion, the Del Fuegos, and the more urban Springsteen.

Springsteen himself seems to have taken them under his protective wing, showering them with praises and often inviting them to play with him this past year. The lyrics of Meet me by the river's edge"...NO SURRENDER, my BOBBY JEAN. And we been burned by all our fears. Just from GROWING UP round here." seem to speak clearly.

Rock proletariat, road romanticism, and melancholy (the group likes to define themselves as a cross between Springsteen and The Cure) are constants. The Gaslight Anthem knows how to push the punk accelerator in songs like Great expectations, The '59 sound (owing to The River period), The patient Ferris wheel, the clashy Film noir and the nearly rockabilly Casanova, baby!. But they also know how to speak to the heart as in the blues of Even cowgirls get the blues or the ballad Here's looking at you, baby.

This second album by the band, completed by Alex Levine, Benny Horowitz, and Alex Rosamilia, although not the pinnacle of originality in the musical field, has been appreciated for its genuineness and mastery in speaking to new generations with a language that draws from the dawn of rock'n'roll, mixing hope, romanticism, and disillusionment.

When radio stations accompanied long rides on the deserted American roads and 9/11 was still far off. Did the Gaslight Anthem perhaps pick the wrong decade?