After five albums and 10 years of grit’n’gasoline-caked anthems with New Jersey rockers The Gaslight Anthem, frontman Brian Fallon has ditched the dirty denim and branched out on his own.
With ‘Painkillers’, the 36-year-old songwriter has bucked the heavy, Pearl Jam-indebted stylings of his band’s critically divisive last album – 2014’s ‘Get Hurt’ – to offer up something a bit more stonewashed and emotionally frayed.
Instead of the butch riffing that Fallon made his name with, ‘Painkillers’ plugs directly into the roots of country and laid-back acoustic songwriting. Yet it still retains a sense of toughness. This is the closest Fallon has come to Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ so far, teaming up with Nashville-based producer Butch Walker, who also worked with Frank Turner on his 2015 album ‘Positive Songs For Negative People’.
Like Turner, Fallon doesn’t shy away from injecting a little ferocity into folk music. ‘Painkillers’ was recorded last year at Walker’s Traxidermy Studios in Nashville, and is a direct continuation of the Gaslight man’s Americana-driven Horrible Crowes side project of 2011, only imbued with more confidence.
Thanks to acoustic finger-picking, the high and lonesome wail of a pedal steel guitar and vintage harmonies, ‘Long Drives’ takes us musically furthest from familiar Gaslight territory – even if lyrical nods to listening to beat-up cassettes in cars and post-hardcore bands (“I met a girl with a taste for the world and whiskey and Rites Of Spring”), place it firmly in the Fallon canon.
His obsession with Hollywood’s glory days also seeps through in ‘Steve McQueen’, a softly shuffling tribute to his hotshot hero. The piano-led ‘Honey Magnolia’ ploughs an equally sensitive path, with Fallon’s husky Marlboro Reds-infused croak rendered a near whisper as he fans the dying embers of a relationship.
It’s not all rough-hewn campfire balladry however. Fallon can still push the pace forward, as he does on the spry ‘Rosemary’, with the throaty hoedown of ‘Smoke’ and in the positive cowpunk that underpins the redemptive ‘A Wonderful Life’.
With The Gaslight Anthem’s future uncertain – they’re currently on a hiatus that began after their performances at last year’s Reading and Leeds Festivals – there’s no telling what’s next for the band. But on the strength of ‘Painkillers’, Fallon’s transition to a solo career seems risk free.