Show Review: The Gaslight Anthem

The Gaslight Anthem / Marry A Thief / Of Angels and Lions / Twilight Armada

Tuesday July 8th 2008 / New Brookland Tavern / Columbia, SC

So I live in Sacramento California. Sacramento is great. Its got a great selection of pub’s, a ton of great Mexican restaurants and is smack dab in the middle of Lake Tahoe and San Francisco. Although Sacramento is roughly four times the size of my hometown of Columbia it doesn’t do near as a good of job of pulling in music. So why my friends have seen The Colour Revolt like fives times, I am waiting on my first.

I naturally get excited when I come back to Columbia since there is always a chance that I’ll get to see a good show. When my friend Bryan told me The Gaslight Anthem were playing on Tuesday I realized that I got real lucky.

I unfortunately didn’t get to see any but the last opening band and was too busy catching up with old friends to give them much attention. They were young and may or may not have been christian.

The Gaslight Anthem is the perfect band to see live. Even if you can’t remember all of the words you can mouth along. Nobody will care (or at least you shouldn’t). The energy in the room was the magnitude of any of my more memorable punk rock shows. The setlist mainly consisted of Sink or Swim and all the tracks from Senor and the Queen. I don’t think got to hear a lot of stuff from The ‘59 Sound. For a show on Tuesday night, we’re you are looking forward to drinking and singing along to good music, you sort of prefer it that way. My favorite moment was the combination of “Say I Won’t” and “We’re Getting A Divorce, You Keep The Diner”. Both are great live songs with moving sing-along moments.

The sad truth is the only time I’ll be able to see The Gaslight Anthem on the West Coast is at The Warped Tour, which I’ll never do, or some overcrowded SF music club. Its not that seeing The Gaslight Anthem at a large venue would be bad but you prefer to see them in a smaller club.