The Gaslight Anthem + Saint Alvia + Dirty Tricks

It’s always an unfortunate circumstance when a writer needs to review two shows right after one another since there are only so many creative juices to be spread around. That having been said, I apologize to the Street Dogs for phoning in most of their review because I really need everything I’ve got to adequately describe how blown my mind was by The Gaslight Anthem… although, in all fairness, if your show was as good as theirs it wouldn’t be a problem. Don’t feel bad though…I’m almost certain that if Kurt Cobain and Joe Strummer resurrected and formed a six member super group that played both Nirvana and Clash songs that it still wouldn’t be as good those four young men from New Jersey were (but, to be fair, it would PROBABLY be close.)   

Though, to be fair, the show DID have openers in the form of Montreal’s own Dirty Tricks and Burlington, Ontario’s Saint Alvia. Now, I won’t lie, I was really looking forward to Dirty Tricks. Their 2007 full length Sauve Qui Peut was easily one of my favorite records of that year, yet before now I had somehow missed every opportunity I had to catch them live. As it turns out, that may not have been a bad thing…as while the band was tight as all hell; I found their performance relatively dry. Almost as if they knew that the majority of the room was not there to see them and they were reacting in kind. They didn’t appear to have any genuine love for what they were doing, which made it really hard to enjoy it. I acknowledge that it was good, but a little more care would have been nice.

On the other hand, Saint Alvia, who I’d been a vocal non-fan of since I first caught them at Warped Tour in 2007 (back when they were still The Saint Alvia Cartel), were actually a lot more solid than I ever remember them being. After seeing the band open for folk punk legends Against Me! last September, I found my biggest critique of the band was that they kept trying to bounce from genre to genre, never really finding a foothold in any of them. This time around, it appears as if they’ve settled on a groovy, reggae influenced “Clash meets The Hold Steady” sound that they pulled off quite well. While they still aren’t my cup of tea (mostly since I already love The Hold Steady AND The Clash) and their second guitarist still REALLY wants to be Joe Strummer (to the point of embarrassment), at least this time they were consistent and their growth over the last half a year is evident as well. They’re not quite there yet, but they are showing definite improvement.

Which brings us to the headliners and the reason I finally broke my stigma surrounding going to shows at La Tulipe (which, despite being horrendously out of the way, turns out to actually be a really great venue), New Brunswick, New Jersey’s The Gaslight Anthem. When I first heard of these guys in 2007 with their debut full length Sink or Swim, I suspected that for the first time in a long time I had something special on my hands. Just a short year later they released their second record, The ’59 Sound and by that point I was POSITIVE that I might have found that one band that in will be selling out arenas in ten years and I will get to say “neener neener, I saw them when…” However, success on record and success when playing live are two monstrously different things. However, after being lucky enough to attend one of the record release shows for The ’59 Sound in August I could rest comfortably knowing that what may possibly be the most earnest rock band to come out of the east coast punk scene in the last ten years was just as tight, earnest and downright SOULFUL live. However, going into this performance I was left wondering…”was their awesomeness entirely dependent on the special status of the show? Was what I saw then the norm, or will this be a paint by numbers, 50 minute set full of new stuff and not much substance?” As it turns out, and answer to all of those was an emphatic NO. As the band took the darkened stage, singer/guitarist Brian Fallon addressed the audience as if they were old friends…”man…its dark in here…lemme tell you a ghost story from New Jersey…” before the full band launched into (59 Sound lead off track) “Great Expectations” and set the standard for the rest of the evening. Playing for well over an hour, the band managed to not only run through ALL of The ’59 Sound but the entirety of their Senor and the Queen EP (also from 2008) as well, in addition to four fan favorites from Sink or Swim (“We Came to Dance”, “Boomboxes and Dictionaries”, “The Navesink Banks” and “I’da Called You Woody, Joe”.) Through all of that, they never once let the intensity fall below and dull roar and the few breaks they did take were filled with Fallon’s innocent brand of witty stage banter. While saying he “worked the crowd” would be a somewhat inappropriate choice of words in this case, he made it clear that he in no way held himself above those in the crowd as he addressed everyone in attendance as friends and equals. If I were sharing a beer with him, I would expect there to be nothing different.

This connection to the audience and acknowledgement of their past is particularly important given how unbelievably huge this band will be in a very short time. They already went from being complete unknowns to “the next big thing” in under a year and in a few months they’ll be opening for their idol (and predominant musical influence) Bruce Springsteen in front of eighty thousand people in England. I can’t even imagine where they’ll end up after that, but I will say that a year ago they were “the next Against Me!” and I can safely say that at this point it’s more like “the next Rolling Stones.”  Now before you go calling “bullshit” on me, I’ll ask if YOU have ever seen a band play a city for the first time in their three year career and have the entire 700+ person crowd sing along to every single word? I think not.