You Aint Supposed to Die on a Saturday Night
Posted on | February 6, 2009 |
The Gaslight Anthem are the Quentin Tarantino of rock music. It’s obvious they have been locked in a basement with every classic American rock record and film since 1950 and they studied them hard. Maybe too hard. But man are you glad they did.
Rock has been really nostalgic the last few years. Since The Strokes. The Strokes were nostalgic for early sixties rock bands like The Kinks and The Zombies. The White Stripes were nostalgic for the thirties blues. The Arcade Fire and The Killers bent themselves over backward in nostalgia for Springsteen. But as heavy as the americana imagery in The ‘59 sound is, it isn’t nostalgia. What has been nostalgia for other bands, The Gaslight Anthem simply uses as a platform to sing about life–a language of commonly understood icons.
When in “High Lonesome” Brian Fallon sings “Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand/I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” he isn’t being nostalgic for Elvis. Elvis is an icon; we know who he is and what he means. We also know what Nashville means. They both communicate something about the mythos of rock and roll, but they aren’t nostalgic for the 50’s any more than James Joyce was nostalgic for ancient Greece in Ulysses.
Even better, The Gaslight Anthem don’t really sound like any of their obvious heroes. They don’t sound like Elvis or Springsteen particularly. They sound like good, well-structured power rock. They have a lot of hooks and energetic choruses at the end of building verses. If the songs weren’t so perfectly crafted, they would be sonically generic. Instead they are memorable rock and roll.
The one fault of The Gaslight Anthem is overuse. By the time you are done listening to the album, the iconic imagery feels thick, almost rote. Elvis? Check. Marilyn Monroe? Check. Humphrey Bogart? Check. Audrey Hepburn? Check. Springsteen? Check. Paul Simon? Check. Mustang Sally? Really? In individual songs, though, they come off effortless and powerful. (The exception is the unfortunate “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Brian, I’m sorry, but Tom Petty songs don’t drive old men crazy. Old men LOVE Tom Petty.)
Surprisingly, the best imagery on the album comes far away from ’50s America. The rattling chains in the hospital walls of “59 Sound” come from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Brilliant. Totally unexpected, but a grabbing metaphor for guilt, sin, regret. Dickens makes another appearance in the first track “Great Expectations.” You have to love a rock band that can take equal inspiration from Miles Davis and Victorian literature.
But this is almost academic analysis. The Gaslight Anthem are great song writers, but they are better rock and rollers. They are earnest, proud, yearning, desperate, romantic, sexy and so are their songs which is all that has ever mattered in rock and roll.
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