As Emily Wolfe arrives onstage, she does so with Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” playing.
It’s easy to pigeonhole things. We all do it, whether we admit it or not, and faced with the knowledge that Wolfe is a singer-songwriter from Texas, you might have a picture in your mind as to her sound. Not much like Courtney Love and the lads, you might think.
You’d be wrong.
What the three-piece she’s here with does is very raw, almost punk in places and Wolfe revels, you imagine, in confounding expectations.
“Second Of Relief” is more mellow and she’s clearly adept doing whatever she decides (and more than once the set appears to be thought of spontaneously).
She appears with a double neck guitar a la Richie Sambora when he was doing “Wanted (Dead Or Alive)” for the glorious “Silencer” and the fact that she can produce a set choc full of great songs is underlined by “Cigarette Burns”.
“Heat Of The Moment” is a swirl of feedback and her voice shines. The riff is almost Soundgarden too. As if to prove yet again that she’ll go with the wind and where it blows her.
That even extends to the stomping, near glam flavour of the last one “Holy Roller” and after reeling off a load of her favourite Gaslight Anthem songs (she does it a couple of times) and a wave, she’s gone. Job done, if that job was to be one of the more surprising and interesting supports you’ll see.
Between bands, it appears that we’ve stumbled into a classic rock disco. Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and many more pump out, and as the lights go down to signify the arrival of New Jersey’s best band that’s not The Boss, they do so to the strains of Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” (which isn’t a sentence I expected to write today).
By extension, of course, The Gaslight Anthem are these days, probably a “classic” band themselves. It’s around 16 years since the world went mad for “The ’59 Sound” and it’s over 15 since MV first saw them play.
You’re supposed to do the cliché at this point and say “Yes but they haven’t changed a bit”, but they have literally, as they’ve aged and added some touring members and musically they are not the same band as they were back then either.
They released their first album in nine years last year. “History Books” was a worthy comeback too. Opening here with “Positive Charge”, the new stuff is interspersed throughout the set.
One of the things I’ve always loved about TGA is you never know from one day to the next what you’re going to get.
The title track of the “Handwritten” album early on is interesting, the name cut from “American Slang” would have been just as comfortable at the end of the set, but is thrown in early. It’s that kind of night.
“Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” is more than just the first “….Sound” track. It’s a study into what makes them a great band. Full of nods as to their heroes, yet entirely their own, it is followed by “We Came To Dance” from their often overlooked debut (another song from it “We’re Getting A Divorce, You Keep The Diner” is played much later and is a surprise and a highlight).
There are a few songs – given the nature of them playing a different set each night it often happens – that you just haven’t heard for ages and make you re-evaluate. Tonight that happens with “Helter Skeleton” and “Underneath The Ground”.
Emily Wolfe is back for a superb take on “The Weatherman” – full of melody – and “Blue Jeans And White T-shirts” (given a makeover on the EP they put out yesterday).
Another perhaps “lesser heralded” track “Autumn” is dark and hypnotic, and “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” is added on the spur of the moment it seems.
“…..Books” arguable best moment “Spider Bites” and its darkest “Michigan, 1975” are both wonderful, and whilst the band always gets “not doing an encore bonus points” from me, they also pace this set perfectly. “45” is as punk as they get and “59 Sound” gets a moshpit going to end.
I’d seen them last a couple of years back, and frankly, the fact you couldn’t shut singer Brian Fallon up rather detracted from the flow. It’s noticeable here that by contrast he barely speaks. The gig is better for it. The Gaslight Anthem always had one of the biggest collections of brilliant songs from the 2010s era, and hearing them play for 90 minutes with such focus really brings that home.
