Quintessentially American, they make music with Springsteen in mind.

Date: November 16, 2010

Venue: Rock City

While classic American rock continues its renaissance, The Gaslight Anthem’s soulful blue-collared rock stomp is both de rigour and welcome.

With a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy love affair gripping the nation, there can be no better band than The Gaslight Anthem to satiate our need to holler “yeehaw” and “hell yeah” at the top of our voices like beery Yanks at a “ball game”.

It’s a cliché to mention Bruce Springsteen in relation to The Gaslight Anthem, and perhaps even The Killers. But seeing as Gaslight are the band that The Boss-lovin’ Killers would be if Brandon Flowers stripped away some of the silky gloss to reveal the dusty bones of their best songs, it’s almost impossible to ignore his influence.

It can be heard brilliantly permeating the alt.rock grandiosity of Great Expectations, The 59 Sound and new belter American Slang, songs that couldn’t sound more Springsteen-era classic rock’n’ roll if they wore a cowboy hat.

Brian Fallon’s throaty rasp cuts deep into the front row like a rock ‘n’ roll razor blade, while Alex Rosamilia’s rapier-sharp guitar is wonderfully taught throughout.

Fallon’s tales are wordy, quickly-delivered rambles, sometimes as undecipherable as his ambiguous on-stage patter, largely thanks to a thick New Jersey brogue clogging up our unaccustomed ears.

But when the music is this good, who needs to understand every word anyway?

So despite all the lazy whiskey-soaked, hay-chewing Springsteenian references we could throw at them, there are few bands in the same bracket as The Gaslight Anthem right now. Hell yeah!