Steve LampirisThose boys from Jersey – who I unabashedly love – are putting out an EP called Hold You Up for 2012’s (second) Record Store Day happening on Black Friday. It’s an acoustic EP (details here), including a cover of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love.” Bias aside, it’s a pretty great cover. They manage to retain the haunting nature of the original while adding their own touches – most notably, keeping the interweaving guitars that they’ve perfected.
New Gaslight Anthem: “45”
The Jersey punks are back with the first single from the upcoming fourth record, Handwritten. The band tells Rolling Stone that they “wished to return to the driving punk rock that ignited” their early work. True to their word, the song’s a little heavier (relatively speaking, of course) than anything on 2010’s American Slang. I’d argue that “45” fits between Slang and its predecessor The ’59 Sound, both the album and title track of which…
Top Albums of the Decade: 2008
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This post is part of our “Top Albums of The Decade” series. Follow the series to read about the best music to grace our ears in the 2000s. Portishead – Third (Island Records) Muscular synthesizers, drum breaks and abrupt endings keeping the tension high. In a few words this is how Portishead’s third studio release, suggestively titled “Third,” sounds like. An amalgam of noise, distortions and Eastern Bloc minimalism is what the first listener might…
Stream the new Gaslight Anthem song, “American Slang”
So the Jersey punks – who put out the best album of 2008, the title track of which I gushed about last November – have put the title track from their forthcoming album, American Slang, up on their MySpace site. It’s the next logical step in the band’s sonic evolution. That is, they retain the punk style of Sink of Swim and the ’70s soul-tempered nature of The ’59 Sound while adding a dash of…
Songs of the decade: “The ’59 Sound”
The Gaslight Anthem | “The ’59 Sound” | 2008 From its Born to Run opening riff to its down-and-out, working man lyrics (including repeated lines), the title track to The Gaslight Anthem’s second outing is the best pure rock song of the Aughts. [Maybe I’m slightly biased. It is, as of the time of this writing, the second-most played song on my last.fm account.] To give you an idea of just how Springsteen-esque this song…