I
guess before I get into the concert I should say a little about the music in
general, so you know where I’m coming from. The ’59 Sound is my favorite
of the albums. It starts out with my two favorite songs, “Great Expectations”
and “The ’59 Sound”, and then goes right into that great intro on “Old White
Lincoln” and into “High Lonesome”, and that is just an amazingly strong opening
for an album. I can only think of one stronger opening, with My Chemical
Romance’s The Black Parade, and that is coming from a completely
different point of view and trying to accomplish different things.
My
point is that if a few tracks into The ’59 Sound you are not tapping
your feet and feeling good, okay, I guess we have really different tastes and
I’m trying to respect that, or maybe you are just dead. And it has “The Patient
Ferris Wheel”!
I
am currently reading John Taylor’s autobiography, In the Pleasure Groove,
and he points to the influence of church hymns on British pop, and attributes
much of American music to Gospel, especially with the tradition of call and
response. There’s a fair amount of that in their music, not just with the
responses, but also with the sense of joy and elevation. That seems to be what
a lot of the fans gravitate towards. They know all of the pain in life, but
they turn it into something beautiful. That’s fair to say across all of the
albums, even if I am playing favorites.
That
sounds a little gushy, but I do admire the band, and I am not too cool to admit
it. I can also be analytical though, and I will try and do that as we continue.
Last
night Brian Fallon, lead singer of The Gaslight Anthem, sent out a tweet with a
very negative review of them. It was on the Vice site, so I guess it counts as
professional, and maybe that was the problem, because it represented everything
that turns me off about professional music writing. It was mean-spirited, with
an attitude of superiority despite the lack of actual depth, and used
ill-founded comparisons that made no sense.
It
was interesting on one level, because my post on deciding against pursuing
music writing has been getting hits again, and hey, this is exactly what I
meant! Also, it reminded the band seems pretty comfortable with negative
feedback. The main Twitter account has re-tweeted many instances of
@JADEDPUNKHULK ripping on Fallon’s nerdiness, and they were the ones who
forwarded Rachel Barber’s Tumblr post. Her post was influential for me in
feeling comfortable doing reviews, in that she loved them but still made fair
criticisms.
Links
to both pieces, and my related blog posts, will be at the bottom. I kind of
don’t want to refer people to the Vice piece, because I don’t want to
popularize it at all, but I guess it provides background. For Hulk and Rachel,
I totally see their points more now.
With
Rachel’s essay, the line that really got me, after saying they weren’t that
remarkable, was “Sometimes Brian Fallon’s voice is up to snuff, sometimes it
isn’t.” That took me aback, because I was just starting to listen to them a
lot, and I was constantly thinking, Whoa! They are so good! How can she say
that?
With
@JADEDPUNKHULK, I thought the nerd thing was because there are so many literary
references in the songs. Of course, that’s actually pretty common with punk. I
think they’re more on the side of rock than punk, but there are punk roots.
(There is, however, absolutely not a Blink 182 beat, and certainly not on
“45”.)
Besides,
what I have been learning over the past year is that a lot of musicians are
really nerds, though it tends to only come out in interviews; on stage they
seem cool! (I don’t hold being a nerd against anyone anyway; that would be
grossly hypocritical.)
Brian
Fallon is kind of a nerd on stage too. Some of it may have been an acoustics
issue, because he was trying to hear what the audience was saying and having no
luck, which may have impaired banter. He was quoting Anchorman, and
actually, he was quoting the best scene of Anchorman (the one with Jack
Black), but I’m not sure that it registered with a lot of people. And his
speaking voice is not as imposing as his singing voice. Also, I can concede
that there are better singers out there. It simply does not matter.
The
Gaslight Anthem is not a flashy band. They don’t have a fancy stage show, or costumes,
or banter. They smile at each other a lot, so I believe that they love what
they are doing, and doing it with each other, but they don’t even move around
that much.
The
most frenetic person is Benny Horowitz on drums, and he’s sitting down. He pounds
those drums though, and he was kind of the most interesting to watch because of
his high energy and his outfit, where with the sleeveless black t-shirt, long
hair, and fairly new but still well-established mustache, he looked kind of
metal, which is not how the band sounds.
The
guitarists could have been jumping around and trading places –that happens with
a lot of other bands— but they didn’t. I think Alexander Rosamilia would have
been perfectly happy playing the show offstage. He waved to us at the end, but
it was the first eye contact. On the other side, Alex Levine almost seemed to
do some posturing at times, or maybe it just looks that way when a tall
handsome guy is playing rock, whether he’s trying to or not. Again, none of
that mattered.
The
other input I had was from the liner notes for Handwritten, with a piece
by Nick Hornby, and he was addressing it from the point of view of how it’s all
been done before, so how do you try and say something new? You can make it
really weird, or you can just make peace with it and try and be authentic.
I
really don’t think The Gaslight Anthem are worried about their legacy, or where
they fit, or anything like that. They just get up there and play, and it is
amazing. The throaty voice does work, but it works because of the soul in the
music. In many bands it is the job of the lead singer to flirt and coax and get
the audience pumped up, and that’s not really what he was doing, but he didn’t
need to. He just needed to be there, pouring out all of the emotions of their
songs. There is intellect and there is skill and all of that, but mainly there
is this heart.
I
suppose their performance is kind of workmanlike in that sense, accomplishing
the job with a minimum of stagecraft, but there is still that joy too. It infuses
the music listening at home, and it becomes a shared thing with the crowd at
the concert. We had shared joy.
Their
inability to hear our requests probably had nothing to do with how many
different songs they played, but they played a lot. It was a long set, and then
the encore was longer than most bands do. They were so generous! For me, a good
concert always results in me loving the band more.
I
really love The Gaslight Anthem. More now than ever.
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