The Gasoline Age

Rock ’n’ roll has also long been obsessed with the dual totems of cars ’n’ girls, and of contemporary bands the likes of Mercury Rev and the Vulgar Boatmen have made sure the Americana idyll doesn’t run out of gas.

The latest addition, however, is New Jersey’s East River Pipe, who with The Gasoline Age have made one of the finest American albums of the year. The brainchild of one F.M Cornog, who has been feted by noirish country-rock aesthetes Lambchop, East River Pipe’s fourth album is a thrilling homage to the automobile while at the same time offering a sort of back-handed critique of our love affair with our motors.

Unlike, say, David Cronenberg’s Crash, however, The Gasoline Age doesn’t make you fall asleep at the wheel or engender fantasies of running over its participants; rather this is an album of driving songs that would itself be great to drive to: it has more tunes than a packet of cough sweets and its languorous, reverberating melodies evoke similar dreamlike reveries to Deserter’s Songs.

But there’s an edge to Cornog’s vision; the title ‘Shiny, Shiny Pimpmobile’ says it all really – the unsullied innocence of Kerouac’s journey has been replaced by the seedy, nocturnal voyage of a night hustler: “the cherry bombs, confederate flags/don’t forget, that’s all you are.”

‘Party Drive’, like the movie Swingers, evokes that goodtime feeling of heading out on the town with your mates in search of Life with a capital L: “Route 26? or 22?/a joint for me, pills for you/summer nights, no cops in sight/it’s a party drive.”

The closing track, ‘Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Million Tonight)’ puts a darker spin on the same hedonistic manifesto, with its story of a guy running off to the Vegas of the East Coast to try and erase the memory of an abused childhood by spending the night at a card table. As a whole, this album is a thrilling, open-topped ride through both pretty and prickly emotional terrain.

Leaded but never leaden, The Gasoline Age really sucks diesel.