AR: American Slang

The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang (2010)

This review is by request from reader "Jon Sigma," who asks the straightforward and thoroughly justified question: why the hell, given that this band sounds *remarkably* similar to Against Me!, is everyone making such a big deal about this band? So in my newfound interest in writing concise reviews, I'm going to write a paragraph that covers what this album sounds like, one paragraph that parses Jon's question, one that attempts to answer it, and a wrap up paragraph that gives something resembling the smoldering embers of an original thought of my own experience of hearing it. Review, VOILA! These are the terrible trials of someone engaged in the perpetual reading of grad school texts.

By invoking cultural allusions like Bon Jovi, The Sopranos*, "George Costanza's employer" and "Michael from The Office," I am simultaneously dodging the lame routine of name-checking this band's powerfully obvious musical influence/ancestor AND engaging in the equally lame routine of referencing the fact that said comparison is inevitable in reviews of this band. I'm not sure if referencing the fact that referencing the fact is routine has yet become routine, but that sprinkling of meta-cheese makes this word salad oh-so-tasty... aw, screw it... restart paragraph one:

* - On two levels, really, if you think about it.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Phew. American Slang is a half-hour blow-by of (unsurprisingly) anthemic blue-collar rock music, steeped in a particular kind of Americana - think more pop-rock, heartland blues and Motown than, say, the folk-Americana of the Grateful Dead - and delivered with a familiar, emotive vocal snarl. It's the same frustrated, wistful sickness of the suburbs that his Bossness mastered decades ago, but delivered with enough of an edge of Clash-esque genre-mixing to qualify as not entirely derivative. (Feel free to question how incorporating not one but two 1970s acts renders things non-derivative). Bruce rather famously mocked the pathos of barroom remembrance ("speedball? "really?) while engaging in music that heavily evoked the '50s, and this is a sort of post-ironic update of that idea; "Don't sing me songs about the good times / those days are gone" sung in the 2000s version of indie-rock BruceTimbre is largely the game here, and it's largely effective. It's nostalgia music on two planes - in the fact of its hearkening to '70s barroom rock AND it's constant references to "when we were young" - and via its great composition / insightful if occasionally embarrassing-to-this-cynic's ears lyrics, it hits a nice middle ground of longing for the comfort of the past while admitting that it probably wasn't all that comfortable. It's heart-on-its-sleeve big-verse-bigger-chorus rock, which for a lot of people is pretty much the epitome and aim of the sport. Oddly, it's not always particularly catchy, just sort of big, if that makes sense as a categorical difference. It's no doubt a good album start to finish that feels downright professional in its tight structure, but really, for all its commercial success, it lacks standout single material. You know, like a workingman's album should.

So it's admittedly good - but how did it manage to leap its way into critics' hearts and MTV show soundtracks? Jon noted accurately that it if you listen to this with a punk ear, the similarities to Against Me! are readily apparent (and indeed, The Gaslight Anthem opened for AM! once upon a time). I've listened to this disc and tried to dissect the phenomenon / Jon's q over the last week, and I think it comes down to three possibilities. One, the question on face is at least a little misleading, as it's not like this band has broken through and Against Me! didn't. The latter got all kinds of mainstream press with 2007's New Wave, including "album of the year" status from Spin and the like. I.e., one answer to this question is that TGA is successful BECAUSE they sound like Against Me!, and this is just the nostalgic-anthemic pop-punk formula, now with extra BS, succeeding once again. But if we grant that TGA has been more successful (or at least it's strange that they succeed with such immediate similarity), we're led to another possibility - that the overt Bruce-similarity is so overwhelming that the Against Me! similarity goes unnoticed. A quick survey of the reviews shows AM! coming up about 1/30th as often as the Boss, so there may be something to that - the consensus admiration of TGA's successful incorporation of Springsteen as an obvious influence sort of blocks out accusations of derivation from other bands. But that, natch, just invokes the question of why it's okay to mimic Springsteen. So I'd prefer to dwell on the third possibility*, that as similar as TGA may sound to both AM!** and BS, there is at least one important difference - the treatment of nostalgia - that distinguishes them.

* - Damn the paragraph rule - there is a fourth possibility that one should at least keep in the back of one's head, and that is the whim of the momentum of critical reception - i.e., if the right person in the right context picks up on the band and has enough influence to get the ball rolling, then bands that sound extraordinarily similar will have highly divergent career arcs. This is akin to saying "it's arbitrary" and is thus deeply unsatisfying, but it is worth noting that sometimes the locus of explanation is in the social process of establishing something as "good," what assholes like me sometimes refer to as "reification," rather than being in the content of the art itself.

** - Damn the paragraph rule again, because I should also note that TGA has an important difference in sound from AM! - the latter is given to rebellious punk anthems, while the former utilizes a much cleaner guitar sound reminiscent of an undistorted fifties electric. In other words, both bands are fairly bright and glossy sounding with big, stringy melodic guitar leads over their cha-chung guitar and bass rhythms, but AM! is more immediately recognizable as a punk band whereas TGA comes off as more of a good ol' rock band. Both are fist-pumping rebel-rousers of a type, even outside of lyrical content, but AM! seems more inherently angry - okay, "irked" - relative to TGA's sad/hopeful sound. This is yet another way of saying that "TGA sounds more like Bruce than AM! does," but it may betray the notion that discontent and that odd strain of despair/hope are just flat out more compelling to critics now than the rebel yell, even if it's just in the guitar tone.

Now that I've shattered all my rules of brevity, I'll keep the actual thesis short. AM!'s nostalgia is one, personal - it's a literal remember when *we* were young and did thing X - and two, defiant. They are nostalgic, true, but nostalgic explicitly for the energy and rebellion of their youth so as to bring it to bear on their current state. This strikes me as an emergency, midlife crisis sort of nostalgia, or even better, that of a seventeen year-old yearning for when he was ten. It's powerful, but there's something trapped about it, like the nostalgia-experiencer is still naive enough to think that this time, things are going to be different. It's also steeped in personal history and again, more "teenagey" in that respect, a little too focused on the immediate narrative. So it's brimming with optimism and energy, but optimism that does not realize its ultimate futility. TGA's nostalgia, by contrast, is a more general, collective nostalgia, speaking on the shackles of youth and such as experienced in middle-class America. Two, it's more aged in its assessment. It makes the paradoxical realization that nostalgia simultaneously releases and leaves one stuck, and so does not try to rally the nostalgia for energy of rebellion, instead merely looking for a largely qualified dose of sad comfort. That difference is key - the TGA version is almost automatically more mature and thereby more attractive to the critical audience who is itself aged and, as noted above, in charge of awarding stars and generating buzz about albums. Note that I am not saying that it's a "better" nostalgia - you could make the charge that it's a cop-out, resigned sort of past-longing. As futile as the teenaged version may be, at least it rails its fists against the void, doesn't just wax about it. And finally, if you'd like to grab me a beer sometime, I'll expound on the following thought - that what critics appreciate via the overt Bruce-referencing is that the album appears to be nostalgia-for-nostalgia, and so dodges charges of repetition by appearing as another stairstep locked in the American music narrative. Not to mention that said nostalgia happens to be about a favorite artist from the youth of many an influential critic. So, it seems, aping an all-time critic's darling in a way that seems to be about, loosely, that critics' darling - so not imitating at all, but invoking - may just be a really solid career move.

There are a few factors, sadly, that stand between me and joining the critical consensus. One, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm a textual learner, so i find it really tough to concentrate on sung / spoken lyrics (unless it's the obvious center of the art, as in folk or hip-hop). That which grabs my attention from this album is occasionally compelling and also occasionally embarrassing, so I'm not as in love with TGA's songwriting as others are. Two, I am not the world's biggest Bruce Springsteen fan - I don't dislike him, but his overwrought, melodramatic tendencies tend to grate on me. Seeing their shadows here, and in less catchy / radio-friendly form, doesn't make me dislike them, but I'm not drawn by any means. Three, while I try to be something of a post-ironist - someone invested in getting to the authentic and not just, believe it or not, the distanced critical snark - I don't think this nostalgia / hypersincerity is really the right way to go about it. Four, there's too much mid-tempo here that results in a bit of the samey, dangerous for an album that is already confined by its adherence to a couple of easily-recognized influences.

So while I get the mode in operation here, and again, I think this is a finely crafted, top-to-bottom solid album, it doesn't really do it for me on a profound level. I have the repeated experience of "this sounds stirring" rather than being stirred, and that is the quickest way to put it. More than usual, I recognize this as an instance of preference at work, and I wouldn't bemoan anyone whom it does strike meaningfully. There is definitely a lot to enjoy here, not the least of which is arch-professional musicianship, and more than a few little fun allusions mixed about - keep an ear out for an embedded "Please, Please Mr. Postman" chorus. But even the tune I enjoy most, the quasi-jazzy number noted below, comes off as formulaic to me - this is what catchy, genre-bending jazz-blue-collar-rock sounds like - so I'm left short of the mystic depth others seem to feel with this disc. Definitely worth spinning, but I'm at least somewhat with Jon in questioning the extent of the praise that this one's grabbing.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "The Diamond Church Street Choir"