Gaslight Anthem Channel '60s British Blues on 'American Slang'

Although soulful punk rockers the Gaslight Anthem haven't dramatically altered their musical approach for their third LP, 'American Slang,' fans may notice a few subtle differences. As frontman Brian Fallon previously told Spinner, the song lyrics aren't filled with references to women named Mary or lines lifted from his heroes like Tom Waits or Bob Dylan. In that same vein, the band also moved away from the straight-ahead, four-chord rock on their 2008 album, 'The '59 Sound.'

"What happened with this one was kind of weird -- it came to me in my mind first and I had to figure out what I was doing on the guitar or piano," Fallon tells Spinner. "I would hear these parts and be like 'that's what I'm going to write, but I don't know how to play that.'

The process was very different for Fallon, who wrote most of the songs on the acoustic guitar that was nearly destroyed by American Airlines. "You kind of fiddle on the guitar a little and then something comes and there it is, but this time I would get these bolts of lightning and that was the song," he says. "We don't try to reinvent the wheel, ever, with writing songs but that is a definitely new thing on this record. There's different chord progressions and almost like riffs, so it's kind of weird -- not riffs like Metallica but in the sense of 'Should I Stay or Should I Go,' which I consider a riff."

Another change is the more distorted sound of Fallon and Alex Rosamilia's guitars. "We cleaned it up a lot on the last one. This one, we just turned the amps back up again," Fallon says. "We used natural, kind of old Rolling Stones distortion -- it's more of a bluesy, late '60s English sound. We didn't necessarily go and do something that's similar to [the band's first album] 'Sink or Swim' because that's a real punk record. That's all over the place and this one is not. It's really focused and the songwriting on this one has more of a story, more of a flow to it."

Gaslight Anthem's 'American Slang' is out now via SideOneDummy records.