The Commuter #5 – “American Slang”

I’m not sure what the best part about seeing the Gaslight Anthem in Detroit was. I’ve narrowed it down to two things. The first candidate is the triplet drum fill at the end of the build up right before the last chorus of “The Spirit of Jazz.” The second was the entirety of the song “Great Expectations.”

Such is the nature of the new Gaslight Anthem record American Slang. Where The ’59 Sound is more or less an impenetrable bulwark of magnificent influence pastiche rock, American Slang is a marginally more penetrable wall of pretty great influence pastiche rock. Most of the right pieces are there (that triplet fill!!!) but they don’t fit together as tightly as they did on the last album. There are holes, water is leaking through, I can see light on the other side, etc. etc.

The album has got the same general aesthetic we have come to know and love from the Gaslight Anthem with tiny deviations here and there. I don’t recall anything quite so swinging as “The Diamond Street Church Choir” coming out of these dudes before, and the beginning of “Boxer” does the whole chant-over-drum-beat thing that invariably reminds me of the Black Flag song “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie.” Rather vitally, none of these things come off as facile attempts at variation, more as organic steps forward in the sound.

But.

But, for an almost completely inexpressible reason, the album lacks the “je ne sais quoi” (forgive me) found on The ’59 Sound. Something about these songs makes them good but not great. In much the same way The Gaslight Anthem managed to put on a good show, that was almost entirely forced out of the short-term memory the moment The Hold Steady leaned into the first chords of “Constructive Summer.” I really don’t know what the difference is. It certainly has something do with the energy you can feel bolstering up the music, but the Gaslight Anthem certainly don’t lack for any vigor. And I can’t say it had anything to do with the performances. Despite how young the guys in the Gaslight Anthem very clearly were, the performances were perfectly locked in, and the album has no readily observable flaws.

So it’s difficult to put my finger precisely on what makes The ’59 Sound better than American Slang, or what made The Hold Steady’s set in Detroit better than the Gaslight Anthem’s, or for that matter what made the performance of “Great Expectations” so much more compelling than “American Slang” (which was unfortunately rather limp sounding in vivo). But as the goal of all record reviews, and for that matter all writing (just when you thought it couldn’t get any more pretentious he brings in some sweeping statement about the ‘art of writing’) is to express what previously seemed un-expressible.

So.

The holes in American Slang are the shape of the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you drive past someplace you used to live and you realize just how relentless the passage of time really is, and how absolutely impossible it is to go back to the way things used to be, but where you also see how the future could probably get even better so you start to get excited in the way that you can never really effectively share with someone but that you’re sure that everyone’s got to feel at some point or another. Something in Brian Fallon’s voice, or the way the guitars slide together, or the drum fills, or any number of other musical details keep the stories that on The ’59 Sound sounded like almost pre-verbal echoes of that mixture of nostalgia/lust for life, from becoming much more than just pretty good stories.

American Slang is not a bad album, though, in fact it’s a pretty good one. The same goes for their live show. It’s just that you can feel underneath it all that they’ve got something better in them, and I have no doubt it’s going to burst out sooner or later.