Review Summary: My, how the years and our youth pass on
As I sat on my couch and prepared to press play for the first time on my promotional copy of
History Books, The Gaslight Anthem’s return after a nine year absence, my dominant emotion was trepidation. That might not be the most fitting feeling, given I’m a longtime fan, but it’s what I felt in my gut.
This wariness lay heavily on me despite the fact that even if I don’t return to The Gaslight Anthem’s music as much these days,
The ‘59 Sound continues to sound like a genuine classic when I do revisit it, and the less-renowned portions of the group’s discography still feel rock-solid to me as well. Additionally, frontman/songwriter Brian Fallon’s solo output in the last decade has consistently ranged somewhere between good and excellent. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the band’s comeback wasn’t going to yield good results, primarily based on two factors. First, The Gaslight Anthem’s last album, 2014’s
Get Hurt, released shortly before their announcement of a hiatus, was deeply unsatisfactory, even if ultimately salvageable. Not only was the band’s bread-and-butter growing stale on that record (despite some notable highlights), but their attempts to stay fresh (primarily via the introduction of grunge influences) also faltered and ultimately felt ill-advised. My takeaways were that the band could basically only do one thing (albeit very well, in their heyday), but that the font was running dry, and that I wasn’t confident nine years apart would replenish the spark. Second, and perhaps more important, The Gaslight Anthem’s basic shtick was always backwards-looking, wistfully eyeing the music of romanticized, grizzled, old musicians and, more broadly, some mythic age of America past. That all sounds pretty corny, but something about the musicians’ evident sincerity and talent made everything work out. And back in their prime, this music proved the perfect companion to wilder younger days for me and my friends - looking back, it seems we intuitively understood that the times we were soundtracking would be moments we’d look back on fondly but bittersweetly. But here’s the thing, bands that get back together tend to rely heavily on audience nostalgia - “hey, it’s not their best work, but it’s just good to have them back”. The Gaslight Anthem, though, have always leaned on nostalgia, of a wider and more generalized kind, and if they are now only capable of generating a watered-down version of the aching songs of loss they once played, then, well, that’s just kinda depressing.
Forgive the rambling, let’s get back to that first sentence. I hit play on this album for the first time (having managed to avoid hearing any of the singles previously), and opener “Spider Bites” immediately reinforced all my misgivings. There’s no way around it, it’s a clunky song - a blaring guitar intro, a kinda bland verse structure, a repetitive chorus (albeit quite catchy). It may have plenty of redeeming features, but the tune just never quite fits together right, and those issues are accentuated by a production job which seems designed solely to muffle the music’s strengths (a problem throughout this record). Needless to say, I kept sitting on the couch, girding myself for more disappointment.
And then…
History Books turns out to be a pretty great album, just one with a weak opener and regrettable production. The title track emerges as quite a jam, warm but melancholic, and featuring a tastefully-delivered guest verse from (who else?) Bruce Springsteen. Then there’s “Autumn”, a yearning track which combines some decently heavy riffage with some of the band’s most touching lyricism. From there, it’s a satisfying mix of more upbeat tracks with tenuous punk influence - notably “Positive Charge” (quite good) and “Little Fires” (perhaps the most energetic number here), balancing against gentle and delicate ballads like “Michigan, 1975”, the lonesome “The Weatherman”, and the stately “Empires”. The album’s last two tracks stand apart from this dichotomy in different ways - “I Live In The Room Above” dips into the grunginess which blighted
Get Hurt, but pulls it off nicely, while closer “A Lifetime Of Preludes” is a melodic and vocal-driven piece which feels like it could’ve been pulled from a Brian Fallon solo offering.
From the last paragraph’s assessment of this tracklist, you can probably gather that
History Books is NOT the second coming of The Gaslight Anthem’s early punk era. There are hints of that style here and there in some of the faster-paced tracks, but this record feels most similar to the finest representation of the band’s later period, 2012’s
Handwritten, comparably best-described as relatively mellow alt-rock with a contemplative mood. If the intervening decade or so has shifted anything, it’s that the band has settled even more into a sedate style, punctuated by occasional bursts of vigor. That approach sorts this crew well and allows them to avoid the pitfalls which I grimly spelled out earlier in this review.
History Books might be a “safe” release, but it’s an impressively competent one which can mingle comfortably amid the band’s prior output (questionable production aside). If there’s one significant miss (I’ve already griped enough about “Spider Bites”) and most of the songs don’t measure up to the group’s best,
History Books feels like a coherent return to form complete with some highlight tunes (I’d single out the title track, “Autumn”, “The Weatherman”, and “I Live In The Room Above”, specifically). This isn’t an album to convert the naysayers, but for the already initiated, prepare yourself to once more sing with your heroes, 33 rounds per minute.
