New Jersey Drive

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

The Gaslight Anthem's The '59 Sound (Side One Dummy) (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Few things go together as well as yearning and New Jersey. It's a hard mystery to crack: There are always too many porch lights left on late at night, too many driveways for burned-out Romeos to loiter at the end of, too many girls named Mary in light summer dresses waiting to break hearts and fuel dreams.

The '59 Sound, the irresistible second record from the New Brunswick group The Gaslight Anthem, has all of these things, the latter making her appearance seconds into the first track and exiting with young boys' blood on her claws and an exhausted look in her eyes. There's nothing here you haven't heard before, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't hear it again: The Gaslight Anthem wrap raw heartache in roaring riffs, writing songs that take off like motorcycles, with just as much isolated desperation and pure raw horsepower. The touchstones are so obvious they don't need to be mentioned (re-read the lede: New Jersey, yearning, songs about Mary), but what makes The '59 Sound so engaging is the way The Gaslight Anthem deliver the combination like they're the first ones to discover it. Singer Brian Fallon has a voice like bruised leather, and he drapes it across the songs with practiced effortlessness, some pie-eyed poetic combination of Paul Westerberg and you-know-whooooooooce.

The songs themselves are like summertime, warm and bright and endless, unsparing with their pleasures. The best moment comes in the middle, during the spectacular heartbreak of "Miles Davis & the Cool." Fallon, backed by a team of guitars that glimmer like the moon in a wading pool, clambers to the home of the woman he loves, kisses a rock, heaves it up to her window and makes a simple plea: "Put on your red dress/ and your diamond-soled shoes/ climb on down from that window/ climb on out of your room." That she'll appear just the way he requested, and that they'll both disappear in his beat-up Chevy shortly thereafter, is a scientific certainty. It's almost enough to make you forgive the wholesale Counting Crows quote a few songs before.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)