Aug. 31, 2010 - Issue #776: The Gaslight Anthem

Bring it on

Jersey rock 'n' roll is still alive and kicking

Punk is a genre that lives in the glow of eternal youth, Never Never Land with more disaffection and safety pins. This can keep it vital at the same time as it holds it back: for every group of 40-plus-year-old skate-punks proving that punk is quite dead by singing songs of rebellion to kids who could be their own, there is another group of young punks ready to spit in the face of establishment with all the fire and passion that comes with being young, dumb and full of cum. But, sometimes, punks learn how to grow up, learn to bring that same skepticism and passion to the fact that eventually we have to get jobs and responsibilities and regrets.

Strictly speaking, it's hard to classify the Gaslight Anthem as solely punks. True, the band members got their start in the punk community, their 2007 debut Sink or Swim blowing up on punk blogs and websites before more mainstream attention followed, and to this day they'll show up at events like Protest Fest. They still have some very identifiable elements from youths spent in punk acts in their home state of New Jersey, ragged guitars and ferocious drums popping up on more than a few songs. And they still self-identify to a degree, so that has to count for something.

But maybe just because they've grown up with a certain grace, started wearing their pre-worn faces as well as their pre-washed jeans, they seem to be something a bit more. Their roots extend back to a very particular type of American middle-class storytelling as to graffitied clubs, and it's there where the band seems to be going.

On the group's latest album, American Slang, the Gaslight Anthem has given up youthful dalliance and even wistful nostalgia for something a bit more, well, mature. It would be wrong to say Slang is an album infused with regret: as much as anything, it is a celebration of the youthful indiscretions and blatant fuck-ups that lead a person to where they're at now. But it's also an album that recognizes how dangerous it can be to look back, or at least to get trapped in past glories (or defeats, for that matter). As much as anything, it is a plea to embrace life's propulsive force, to accept that the past leaves its marks with whips, not chains, and keep moving on.

"You always feel like something is slipping away," admits Anthem's lead singer and songwriter Brian Fallon in a plaintive but upbeat measure. "You really start to realize that as you get older—you start to see it in daily life—that a piece of what's happening in each moment is something you'll never have again. And then it's gone, and there's nothing you can do about it.

"That's very sad, and kind of weird, but time is ever moving forward, whether you like it or not," he continues. "People like to try and catch a break, gather up the pieces and start over. But you can't really, because in that time, while you're waiting for all the pieces to come together, your life is moving on. It's 10 years later, and then they're gone. So that's a bad process, and you just have to keep going. God, I sound like I'm 60, right?"

Fallon certainly has something of an older soul, unless it's recently become chic for 30-year-olds to start spouting world-weary wisdom. But even that seems to be something fairly recent for him. Though you could hardly accuse the world view on previous albums Sink or Swim or 2008's The '59 Sound of being naïve, American Slang still seems like a leap into much murkier and richer territory, the product of someone who's done an awful lot of growing up in the past two years. That's something Fallon recognizes now, but he admits that, while he was actually writing the album, it was somewhat hidden.

"When we started out, our goal was really to write albums that people would listen to from the beginning to the end. For this time, though, I didn't know it was going to happen, and it just kind of sounded like that when it was done," he admits. "When you write very immediately, it just kind of happens: whatever's on your mind in your subconscious comes to your conscious, and you don't really figure that out until after, then it becomes, 'Oh, that's what I was dealing with.' You only grow one step at a time."

For anyone who's listened to Slang, that has to be a bit of a surprising admission. The album is a very acute exploration of the near-inescapability of personal history, the struggle to reconcile what has happened without actually getting bogged down in it. A song like "The Queen of Lower Chelsea" is a wistful remembrance of glorious youth that is also heavily shaded with the realization that it probably wasn't as great as you're making it out to be. "Orphans," too, rocks along like an anthem for rambunctious youth, but is fully cognizant of the fact that it's not all it's cracked up to be, undercutting its anthemic qualities with sentiments like "We were orphans before we were ever the sons of regret." The whole thing almost seems like it's trying to remind us that the root, literal meaning of nostalgia is "memory of an old wound."

"[That it was about letting go of the past], that was something I discovered in the middle of the process, and that realization ended up being 'Old Haunts,' he explains, referencing one of Slang's standouts, a song that includes lines like "God help the man who says, 'If you'd have known me when.'" "Looking back on all these different things I'd gone through and different people, I remembered this one particular thing that I'd gone through and this one particular person. You always know that girl who has everything in high school and kind of ends up throwing it all away, ends up somewhere mediocre and maybe wasting some talent, because they kind of bet everything on their youth. That's kind of not smart, because at the end of the day we all end up looking like Keith Richards." V

Wed, Sep 8 (7 pm)
The Gaslight Anthem
With the Menzingers, Fake Problems
Edmonton Event Centre, $27.50 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus