Album Review: The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
It's safe to say that last year's effort from The Gaslight Anthem (The '59 Sound) was a very pleasant surprise and an album I'm happy to still play pretty often. With a name that brought to mind the sort of Russian play that Withnail would have hated (ducks flying to Moscow etc.) I had initially been sceptical of the band yet on first listening the pace and heartfelt, early Springsteen-esque singing grabbed me from the off and made a welcome change. New Jersey was breathing life back into the American Punk life-form.
Two years after that second album's original US release the group are set to unleash their third this summer and expectations were therefore high. It'll maybe therefore come as no surprise that those expectations have not fully been met but that's probably down to them being too high rather than any weakness in the product. Whilst overall the album feels closer to Bryan Adam's Reckless, the pace has dropped off a tad - while that probably shows a maturing of the overall sound it's still a welcome relief when you make it to track nine 'The Spirit Of Jazz' and are rewarded with the sort of song that a 10 track album clocking in at just over half an hour should be consistently delivering. There are no bad songs on display here though and live they'll generally make for good, calmer moments in the set, unless the band decide to gee them up a bit.
On an emotional level however the tunes roundly fail to engage, even after repeated listens and none are as catchy as those on The '59 Sound, so you'll still find yourself humming along to the older numbers in your head rather than those hot off the press. As a third album then this is a solid piece of water treading and should consolidate the ground gained over the last couple of years but the band need to come up with something better on album number four, unless they want to risk drifting backwards into obscurity by the mid-point of the decade.