Album Of The Week: The Gaslight Anthem Handwritten

When the Gaslight Anthem first crossed my radar four years ago, I remember being overjoyed that a punk band like this could still exist, that there was still gold left in them thar hills. The Gaslight Anthem that recorded The '59 Sound, their ridiculously great 2008 breakout, were proud inheritors of a brawny, no-bullshit Jersey punk tradition, one that stretched from the Misfits clear through to Titus Andronicus and Screaming Females. But the Jersey bands they most resembled were the Bouncing Souls and Lifetime, '90s punk bands whose breakneck tempos and fists-up choruses never attempted to disguise the naked sentimentality at the heart of their songs. When I reviewed the album for Pitchfork, I wrote that they were the sort of band "who sing in full-throated groan-man bellows, who unironically cover old country songs, who heroically keep the hair-grease industry afloat." My editors also took out some lines about how a band like this still wears newsboy caps, and how the frontmen of bands like this inevitably release garbage acoustic side projects. (Guilty.) Bands like this meant the world to me when I was a teenager, and I'm being completely real when I say that I don't know how my life would've turned out if I'd never discovered them. A funny thing happened since The '59 Sound, though. The Gaslight Anthem effectively stopped being a punk band. You'd think this would mean they stopped being great, but no. They're just great in a different way now.