THE RECORD

Collider is not really a music site.

We cover Movies, DVDs, TV, Videogames, Collectibles, Toys, Culture, we even have a section that covers a porno from time to time and we’ve printed a political piece here and there. But we’ve really had trouble with music.

But for me, music is important. I spend hours making mixes to perfectly accent my life experiences. I’m voracious. I tear through my local used record store look for that 99-cent gem. At my peak of concert going I attended 27 live shows in one calender year. I’m almost as big a music geek as I am a film nerd.

So, I don’t say this lightly, The Gaslight Anthem is the best new band I’ve heard this decade. Seriously.

“59 Sound” is painfully evocative and one of the most intelligent, poignant, catchy and grabbing records I have heard in recent years. Every track is an epiphany. For 42 minutes straight singer/guitarist Brian Fallon held me enraptured with his driving New Jersey sound. His Joe-Strummer-meets-Bruce-Springsteen-at-Tom-Wait’s-house vocal arrangements carry the album’s 12 tracks through gritty emotional territory and up to heights that I haven’t heard rock and roll go since I first experienced “Born to Run.”

And there are a handful of tracks here that are every bit as good as Springsteen’s signature hit. The titular, “59 Sound” contemplates mortality from inside a car crash and illuminates the unfathomable abyss as hearing, “your favorite song/one last time.” “Miles Davis and the Cool” details a failed teenage romance that gets a second chance in middle age. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” with it’s heavy, seducing riff screams like a crisis, in spite of, or maybe because of it’s kitschy references to Tom Petty. And while all of these tracks are wonderful, the album peaks with, “Here’s Looking at you, Kid,” a suicide note in the form of a long, hard look in the mirror at the end of a wasted life full of rock star dreams, and dive bar nights.

Every track here is a story. And while they might not be epics on the scale of “The Decemberists” work, the ballads about unreached potential and the collapse of the human spirit are touching and rousing. It’s like a Molotov cocktail in a soda bottle, the explosions are somehow sweet tasting. The material is dark and brooding, but it never lapses into self-parody. Fallon walks the thin line of emotional earnestness and pretension with great ease.

The specter of death hangs heavy over most of these songs, often through the placment of clanking chains at the periphery of them mix, (a callback to the title track). But instead of the Faux-angst of the current crop of Emo bands The Gaslight Anthem shows a real understanding of it all. I don’t doubt for a second that Fallon has left gallons of blood on the floor in his lifetime (he’s certainly left a lof of Blood on the Tracks). His gravely voice betrays a life of living on the Darkness at the Edge of Town. The portraits he paints of disheveled denizens of the rust belt seem to come from real life. And all of the men and women in his songs seem real. Their pains hurt. 

Though there isn’t much levity to be found here the album never gets bogged down in self-indulgent death fetish the way that lesser bands often do when reaching for depth. Instead, the album is wisely arranged with hopeful ballads on each end. The first, “Great Expectations” details the hopes of youth, and the last, “The Backseat” emphatically declares that in spite of all the indignities, life really is worth living.  

Fallon knows that rock and roll can save lives. He doesn’t think he’ll hear a choir in his last moments, but rather the churning, burning vitality of The Boss. For the rest of us, we could do a lot worse than hearing “59 Sound.”

CONCLUSION

It’s a masterpiece. Curious? Listen to some songs here: http://www.myspace.com/thegaslightanthem