Who says the Gaslight Anthem doesn’t have a sense of humor? You know, besides everyone who’s heard a single note of their music. But Brian Fallon has to be fucking with us when he says that Get Hurt is “completely different than anything we had ever done before” and that it was inspired by “a lot of poetry books and a lot of Bob Dylan.” He should know this is inherently funny, because the Gaslight Anthem is a band almost exclusively defined by their relationship with Bruce Springsteen, and now here they are, announcing a total artistic rebrand by namedropping the two main influences of the Boss’ earliest days. Here’s the thing, though—Get Hurt is completely different than anything the Gaslight Anthem has ever done, in large part because it is inherently funny. They just seem to be the only ones not in on the joke.
The running subtext is that Gaslight had as much Bon Jovi in them as they did Bruce, but it’s a subtle joke, since Get Hurt draws from a specific time when those guys were essentially two sides of the same coin: both are Jersey boys who packed stadiums with anthemic, synth-gilded rock songs that used role playing and blue-collar archetype to distract you from the storyteller’s celebrity. The main difference is that Bruce made you think he actually worked at a carwash, whereas Jon wanted you to think he was a fucking cowboy. There is nothing inherently wrong with Gaslight Anthem going this route; their whole cross-armed, “real rock ‘n roll” moralizing was tired even before Handwritten, and more power to them if they turn out to be the rare band who can summon the endearing qualities of Jersey hair metal. Why should southern boys like Luke Bryan and Eric Church have all the fun these days?
The problem is that The '59 Sound’s still-pretty-awesome Eddie and the Cruisers mall-punk shtick is the only thing that comes naturally to the Gaslight Anthem, and while Get Hurt finds them admirably trying to do anything but that, the results are the strain of incompatible parts—a band with the heart of a Dodge Challenger and the assembly line and plasticine production of a Kia. 99% of all Gaslight Anthem reviews fail to mention any other member besides Fallon, and it’s just as well; thanks to Mike Crossey’s atypically expensive-with-broke-taste production, Fallon might as well be emoting in front of a House of Blues version of Chuck E. Cheese’s animatronic band. When the title track fails to hold the line on Toto-style power balladry, you wish they were honest with themselves and hired Mutt Lange instead.
With every bungled attempt at pop, metal, or pop-metal, Get Hurt just rewrites its own worst case scenario. The plodding pentatonic riffs and dour, lower-octave vocal harmonies of “Stay Vicious” at the very least renounce any ties to previous Gaslight Anthem records, though a complete alt-grunge overhaul just results in a twang-free Manchester Orchestra. Throw in a stiff, stuffed-pants strut and a gospel choir on “1,000 Years”, and you’ve got the kind of radioactive song of the South that even Kings of Leon won’t touch anymore. On “Stray Paper”, Fallon’s vocals climb honky’s ladder three rungs too high, strangulating, “You better never tell nobody but God all the things I’ve seen”; the only possible explanation is that he’s attempting an Afghan Whigs parody nobody asked for.
Still, when all else fails, Fallon remains the focal point as the most sincere guy in rock, and Get Hurt is the first time he’s written exclusively in the first person. Following his divorce, as well as a retreat from both substances and social media, he's got material to draw from—and yet, he still maintains the same guys ‘n’ dolls vernacular, asking the listeners to meet the new Nathan Detroit, same as the old one. During “Stay Vicious”, Fallon admits, “I still love rock'n'roll and I still call somebody ‘baby’.” Disregarding the rockism, sexism, mansplaining, and ageism that can be perceived in this lyric, it's easy to appreciate the honesty, at the least, of a guy admitting to being an anachronism. And he is true to his word—on numerous occasions throughout Get Hurt, he uses “baby” as a term of endearment.
For example: “Baby, I was born on the 4th of July/ Exploding like a firework”, a key lyric from “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”. Point being, Fallon’s been working for so long within the iconography of “real music” that he can’t seem to express any real emotion without running it through some kind of Boss Babelfish filter. There are two ways to hear him finish the line, “Since you only get high on the weekends, uh-huh”—either “Why don’t you feel me tonight” or “feed on me”—and this is from a song called “Helter Skeleton”. During “Red Violins”, Fallon gravely intones, “20 pounds of curses came to visit me tonight,” and even if it wasn’t a metaphor mixed three wrong ways, 20 pounds seems like a pretty manageable weight. And then there’s pitiable non-resonance of the title track: “I think I’m gonna move to California/ Momma can you say a prayer for me?/ I heard they never get so lowdown/ I heard they never bleed...not like we bleed.” Cue the cheers from the Stone Pony, but not before another damn grease monkey Greek chorus.
Credit where it’s due: this is Fallon’s divorce record and Gaslight Anthem’s “highly produced” synth-rock record, and yet they somehow didn’t just follow the path of least resistance towards recreating Tunnel of Love. Nor did they have any real incentive to change things up—not when they could probably just ride out their caricatured, blue collar punk-hagiographer thing into the Sunset Strip the same way Social Distortion do to this very day. And it’s still so completely sincere that every time you laugh at Fallon, you also feel some kind of pity, so the only thing they truly nailed on Get Hurt was the album cover: an inverted heart that just ends up looking like a cartoon ass.
