The Gaslight Anthem
History Books
RICH MAHOGANY
When The Gaslight Anthem went on hiatus in 2015, things kind of continued as usual for Brian Fallon. As the frontman of the New Jersey band, as well as its member who struggled most with the attention they received, eyes were much more focused on him than his bandmates in the wake of the four-piece’s split. While guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine, and drummer Benny Horowitz branched out into different musical avenues, Fallon’s first two solo albums—2016’s Painkillers, which arrived less than nine months after Gaslight’s break-up, and 2018’s Sleepwalkers—both retained some of the core songwriting characteristics of that band, namely heart-torn, wistful, and nostalgic lyrics usually set to anthemic-punk-by-way-of-heartland-rock melodies. Yet with 2020’s Local Honey, Fallon slowed it down, setting the plaintive poetry of his lyrics to a more gentle kind of Americana—and to utterly devastating effect.
Some three years on—with the band having properly reformed in the spring of 2022—History Books takes influence from both before and after the split, though never in a predictable or obvious fashion. Indeed, History Books is the sound of a band who truly feel comfortable and happy in their own skin again. That’s more of an accomplishment for this band than for many others, given that it was a persistent deluge of lazy comparisons to Bruce Springsteen that ultimately contributed to their demise in the first place. They weren’t totally unfounded—2008’s breakthrough second album The ’59 Sound references The Boss musically and lyrically on a number of songs, something that led to Springsteen proclaiming himself a fan and taking the band, and Fallon in particular, under his wing.
It was a brave move, then, for History Books’ title track to feature Springsteen on vocals. It’s also one that reinforces the point about the band once again being comfortable with who they are. On 2014’s final pre-hiatus full-length Get Hurt, they’d attempted to shift their sound to deliberately escape those comparisons and—somewhat ironically—drifted further away from who they were. There’s no such desire to do so here, and the results are marvelous. On the rolling and tumbling opener “Spider Bites,” youth and love and life all start crumbling, Fallon’s lyrics capturing the fall in his typically bittersweet and poignant way. Witness, for example, the lyrics of the chorus: “We circle ’round the sun until someday we won’t / And on and on and on it goes / And I’ll love you forever ’til the day that I don’t.” It’s followed by the aforementioned title track, a song governed by ineluctable ruins of time—something made all the more profound by the presence of Springsteen, who’s a generation older than the band.
That ever-dwindling supply of time—the conflict between past and present, on both a personal and historical level—is very much at the heart of this album. There’s a real urgency to the boisterous “Little Fires,” while on “Michigan, 1975”—a lilting song based on The Virgin Suicides that would fit perfectly on Local Honey—the past bleeds into the present, and vice-versa, with every second. Elsewhere, “The Weatherman” explores the eternity of love—how it exists both before it arrives and after it vanishes—while “Empires” dives and soars into the morals of humanity from the beginning of time to the current day. Penultimate track “I Live in the Room Above Her” combines its more raucous riffs with muted, solipsistic contemplation, ending with its protagonist turning the radio down—in direct contrast to the many songs from their past on which Gaslight either turned it on or up.
History Books ends with “A Lifetime of Preludes,” a quietly tremulous song that looks back on all of life’s beginnings with the knowledge that the end is nigh. It’s the manifestation of Fallon’s fear in the first verse of “Spider Bites”: “I woke up and thought that I was dreaming,” he sang on that opening track, “that we had reached the end of time.” It seems he did. But as “Preludes” brings that hypnopompic epiphany full-circle, there’s a suggestion, a hope, a wish, that there’s something—whatever that may be—beyond the void, that time isn’t linear, that there’s neither a beginning nor an end. It’s a wonderful return—if they ever really left at all.
