The Gaslight Anthem
London Eventim Apollo
They don’t move around, but they do move hearts.
Ten years ago, when their second album,
The ’59 Sound, failed to breach the British or American Top 50, The Gaslight Anthem were just another New Jersey punk-rock-soul band with a Springsteenian bent. They seemed set for Social Distortion-style cultdom. Instead, the glorious, impassioned songs of The ’59 Sound took on a life of their own, the band hauled themselves onto another level and, here we are, a decade on, with two Hammersmith sell-outs, the album played in order, in full, and a rabid audience hollering along with such abandon that singer Brian Fallon sometimes seems like their backing singer.
The sound, however, isn’t great and there’s a disconnect between the music and its makers. The band are a peculiarly distant live proposition, so where the E Street Band are boisterous family, The Gaslight Anthem are static strangers and Fallon’s only anecdote concerns a Tesco check-out line. All the same, the songs, from the epic Meet Me By The River’s Edge to the ferocious Great Expectations touch a collective nerve by exuding warmth, regret and shared pasts.
There’s more: The ’59 Sound is book-ended by a rum, career-spanning cornucopia of delight, including the rarely aired Old Haunts, a pumped American Slang and the elegiac Blue Jeans & White T-Shirts. Sometimes the music really does speak for itself.