Wednesday, 20 August 2014

'Get Hurt' - The Gaslight Anthem Review


The Gaslight Anthem’s critics have always painted them as a glorified Springsteen tribute band; a description I’ve always deemed unfair, until Get Hurt. Judging by their cavalier pre-release interviews, the band believed that the record would be their Kid A; it was ‘completely different’ from their discography and must consequently be progressive. In reality it is a concept album about Brian Fallon’s talent and utility which inversely suggests that TGA are a one trick pony, that they are at their best as a Springsteen tribute band.

The frenetic riffs and towering adolescent urgency of The 59 Sound-which is almost indisputably their best album-is extinct, replaced by thudding 80s hair metal guitars and lame The 1975-inspired synths. The song structure is equally generic; traditional verse-chorus-verse sing-alongs compose the vast multitude, although there’s one or two quieter ballads; also in verse-chorus-verse. The title track and lead single embodies this. It trundles on with Fallon mumbling some masochistic furrow about embracing love’s misery, supported by some truly insipid guitars. ‘Stay Vicious,’ another single, opens and expands thunderously, before its inevitable soft bridge discordantly implores sensitivity. The album’s all very loud but equally hollow. It just doesn’t work. For all its aggression and self-assurance it’s cartelised by a facetious lethargy. One track, ‘Rolling and Tumblin,’ even evokes Nickelback; just about the worst thing you could ever, ever do.

It doesn’t help that Fallon seems to have lost his sincerity; quite ridiculous considering he’s singing in first-person and that this is his ‘divorce album’. Although more composed vocally, Fallon is still the forlornly earnest romantic. He laments heartbreak, decries exes and venerates the pantheon of True Love. So far, so atypical Gaslight Anthem; his pleaful (slightly morbid) croon for a lover to ‘lie underground’ in ‘Underneath The Ground’ purports him at his most ironically idealistic; on ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ he has ‘tears in his eyeballs’ and ‘wine on [his] lips’; there’s a song called ‘Break Your Heart’; you get the picture. It’s lyrically inane, surprisingly two-dimensional, and is unsubstantiated by bland, technically clunky hooks. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, especially when his mawkish dirges flirt with his overt yarns of love-tinted Americana, where the Springsteen references really come into their own. It’s the same ‘losing my virginity to my highschool sweetheart underneath the moonlight beside a Minnesota lake’ narrative we’ve been fed since 2007, only this time without Fallon’s tireless assiduousness to power it convincing. Less Gaslight Anthem more post-2009 Kings of Leon covering The River.

There are some good songs. ‘Helter Skeleton’ sells the band at three-quarters kineticism. ‘Underneath the Ground,’ although snortily soppy, is sweet, and a pleasant interval from the garage-done-poorly which surrounds it.

Hopefully this will soon be an irrelevant misstep, because ultimately Get Hurt is over-produced and under-written, a barely glamorous vacuum. I’m not saying Fallon shouldn’t try something new, whether musically or thematically; he most certainly should, but he shouldn’t lose his unbridled energy and ferventism in the process, even if it is rooted in States-specific nostalgia. After all, the Springsteen schtick still works for Frank Turner.

No comments:

Post a Comment