Music reviews: Passion Pit, The Gaslight Anthem hit the right notes on new CDs

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(Columbia Records)

From their achingly hip EP “Chunk of Change” to their 2010 follow-up “Manners,” anticipation has been turbo-charged for another pitch-perfect, electro-pop album from Passion Pit.

And their latest, “Gossamer,” hits all the right notes.

The band keeps exploring the themes of hipster life — intoxication, love lost and hopelessness sung in their beautiful, uncontrived manner. Opening track and first single “Take A Walk” is a rousing festival anthem, for which you could easily imagine a beer-tinged audience chanting its chorus.

“I'll Be Alright” blasts with a weighty beat and “Mirrored Sea” sounds like a definite dance-floor hit. Then there's the electro synth-heavy “Cry Like a Ghost,” which muses on excessive drinking.

“Love Is Greed” questions young love with lamenting strings.

Overall, the Massachusetts-based band has a created an album that is melodically upbeat and lyrically melancholy. And it works.

(Mercury/Island Def Jam)

The Gaslight Anthem has always occupied this unsettling space between the earnestness of Bruce Springsteen's lyricism and the musical passion of harder-edged bands like Jawbox.

The former is no surprise, given the quartet's New Jersey roots and the latter — well, this is a band that bounds back and forth across the line between punk and folk with no apologies.

Nor should it.

On its fourth studio album, the appropriately titled “Handwritten,” Gaslight Anthem offers up plenty of material that is rich in texture and layered in its subtexts about love, longing and losing that careens from composed whispers to impassioned pleas.

In a way, the 11 tracks — starting with the sublime “45” — evoke the band's prior recordings of stories blending hope, redemption, memories and regret. But there's a more adult air infusing the 11 songs.

The splintering and howling title track is like a scornful letter about love and loss, yet with a U-turn that transforms it from a clichéd story about couples meeting later in life to something grander and, at its core, hopeful.

The Gaslight Anthem has fashioned a sturdy major label debut that more than pays homage to its upbringing. At the same time, its shows off a maturity gleaned from so much time playing on the road and a cohesion that is remarkable.