Old Haunts Are For Forgotten Ghosts

Regrets I’ve had a few, but there again fuck ’em all and lets make some future ones to the sound of old records playing in the background.

That’s pretty much American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem in a sentence. Thank you, thank you. You’re welcome, move along please there’s nothing to see here.

Bloody good LP, this.

---

Okay, lets get it out of the way first: Gaslight Anthem are a NJ band who do sound like a punk-adjacent Springsteen, with some additional Clash, Social Distortion and Tom Petty flavouring. Yes, yes but.

There is an inescapable melancholic nostalgia inherent in Gaslight Anthem’s sound, American Slang in particular. There’s a constant harking back to when New York was cooler, back to when we were young, back to when jazz was the epitome of cool, back to when we all still had feelings, back to the fucking future.

This would get tedious fast for most acts but it works for the Gaslight Anthem because there is always a sense that they don’t want to be nostalgic, in fact they’re pissed off about it and the fact it seems the only option surrounded by our crappy present (well, 2010*) circumstances.

There is something about American Slang that has really struck something deep inside me this week**. I really liked the LP when it was released and completely forgot about in the last 5 years, or so. Every time I have played it this week I have heard something new and touching in it, even in the couple of tracks I never rated. Hmm.

The best single thing about American Slang, apart from the cover I’ve always really liked, is the sheer performance that it captures – total commitment, beautifully produced by Ted Hutt. No half measures here, no ironic distance, nothing at arm’s length, Gaslight Anthem do that most old-fashioned of things, mean it.

It is this performance aspect that just like seeing a really good live band, elevates the good tracks to great and the lesser tracks to very good indeed. More bands should do this.

Music?

The title track is a doozie, the line ‘I got your name tattooed inside of my arm’ is about as Gaslight Anthem as could be, I found myself howling it in the gym yesterday lunchtime; not cool. Unlike the finger-popping ‘The Diamond Church Street Choir’ which is one of my very favourite songs at the moment, Brian Fallon painting a perfect word picture of an American big city night^, Springsteen-style; Damn, I wasn’t going to mention Bruce!

There is space and light in ‘The Queen Of Lower Chelsea’ that sets it apart. I’m a sucker for the heft and hustle behind ‘Boxer’ but it is the next two cuts that really punch it on home.

From the guitar intro on in, ‘Old Haunts’ is just perfect, the whole bristling, sweating contradiction of the band’s sound, outlook and ethos get nailed in the chorus and the delivery moves me:

So don't sing me your songs about the good times
Those days are gone and you should just let them go
And God help the man who says
If you'd have known me when
Old haunts are for forgotten ghosts

Then ‘The Spirit Of Jazz’ barrels forth and I’m just gone, gleefully lost whirling through the endless promising American night despite all my resistance^^. The promises may be empty and brash, there may never be a destination, but the song is all about velocity, colour and movement.

American Slang is laid to rest by the slow burning ‘We Did It When We Were Young’, which treads a little close to U2 for comfort, so we’ll skip it.

---

So here I am left pining and resentful for a retro fifties American past I never had, how the hell does that work? I am absolutely in love with American Slang right now and it really seems to have caught their absolute best; nothing later of theirs has ever interested me at all.

So sling those guitars lower, click those fingers and really put your back into belting it all out. I like you, don’t sweat the past.

---

The story of the cover is that the band wanted to capture a bunch of their own images of New York, as far from the tourist cliches as possible. They did it.

1235 Down.

*good job we’ve made steady progress in every aspect of humanity since then, eh readers?

**Christ, I hope I’m not coming down with a bad case of … feelings?

^Now the lights go low on the avenue
And the cars pass by in the rain
University boys and the girls fill the bars
While I’m just waiting for the light to change
And the steam heat pours from the bodies on the floor
In the basement where the Jackknives play
For the hub city girls in the ribbons and the curls
Who know the meaning of staying out late

^^and the fact I’m a cynical Welshman.