But they’re aiming for bigger targets: Road-trip playlists, sports-highlight-reel soundtracks. Their old Jersey punk connection lives on in the whoa-oh-ohs that they love injecting into their songs - the single most classically commercial thing that the Misfits gave punk rock. The band hammers away at that style with the same grand, severe sincerity that they brought to their old hearty bashcore.
Handwritten is an unflinching, unapologetic arena-rock record, with all the blazing solos and grunge-derived riffery that the term implies. Instead, they’ve slowed things even further on Handwritten, washing away nearly ever trace of their basement-hardcore past. That was the sort of follow-up that just served to make the world wish the band would return to what they’ve always been great at. American Slang isn’t a bad album, but it felt thin and disappointing after The ’59 Sound. After The ’59 Sound, they released American Slang, an album that pushed their vintage-cars iconography even harder than they’d done before, pulling back on their all-out gallop and attempting to tap some deep vein of anachronistic Americana. The Gaslight Anthem already tried slowing down once. O’Brien’s additions don’t distract from the band’s ferocious thunder they flesh it out in ways so subtle that you barely notice them. And O’Brien earns his paycheck by fleshing the band’s sound out with sharp little touches, keyboards or harmonicas buried deep in the mix. He doesn’t rocket through verses anymore he lingers and ponders and lets the regret and heartache sink in. And these days, Fallon uses his voice in the same wounded soul-singer ways that Springsteen always has. It was always a formidable weapon, but now it’s got a hearty growl that’s just a few degrees removed from Springsteen. Fallon’s open-veined bleat has deepened and thickened over the past few years. And on Handwritten, the Springsteen comparison suits Gaslight frontman Brian Fallon better than it ever has before. And for Handwritten, their new one, they teamed up with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brien, the presumable reason being that O’Brien produced virtually everything Springsteen released during the past decade. In the years since, they’ve shared the stage with Springsteen himself, including a must’ve-been-awesome appearance at Springsteen’s old Asbury Park stomping grounds.
When The ’59 Sound landed, the Gaslight Anthem drew Springsteen comparisons like nobody since the Hold Steady, and the band sure as hell didn’t do much to discourage that impression. They’re just great in a different way now. You’d think this would mean they stopped being great, but no. The Gaslight Anthem effectively stopped being a punk band. A funny thing happened since The ’59 Sound, though. ( Guilty.) Bands like this meant the world to me when I was a teenager, and I’m being completely real when I say that I don’t know how my life would’ve turned out if I’d never discovered them. When I reviewed the album for Pitchfork, I wrote that they were the sort of band “who sing in full-throated groan-man bellows, who unironically cover old country songs, who heroically keep the hair-grease industry afloat.” My editors also took out some lines about how a band like this still wears newsboy caps, and how the frontmen of bands like this inevitably release garbage acoustic side projects. But the Jersey bands they most resembled were the Bouncing Souls and Lifetime, ’90s punk bands whose breakneck tempos and fists-up choruses never attempted to disguise the naked sentimentality at the heart of their songs. The Gaslight Anthem that recorded The ’59 Sound, their ridiculously great 2008 breakout, were proud inheritors of a brawny, no-bullshit Jersey punk tradition, one that stretched from the Misfits clear through to Titus Andronicus and Screaming Females. When the Gaslight Anthem first crossed my radar four years ago, I remember being overjoyed that a punk band like this could still exist, that there was still gold left in them thar hills.