The Gaslight Anthem at Turner Hall Ballroom

Listening to The Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon sing, it’s easy to forget that he’s still a young man. There is a certain gravitas to his voice, a gravelly sincerity that vocalists twice his age would kill to have. It is this element of the band’s sound that has garnered them the now-standard comparisons to Bruce Springsteen. Yes, the band likes The Boss (hell, two of them even have tattoos of Springsteen’s likeness on their arms). Yes, they are from New Jersey. But the band owes a huge debt to other genres often linked to the Garden State, namely the pop-punk sounds of bands like Lifetime and the Bouncing Souls.

This was clear as the band tore through a large number of songs from its latest album, 2008’s The ’59 Sound, on Thursday night at Turner Hall Ballroom. Songs like “High Lonesome,” “Meet Me By The River’s Edge,” and “Great Expectations” were played with gleeful punk abandon—still sounding like The Boss but stripped of his '70s-era bombast and excess (which sounds nice to fans of Springsteen's Nebraska). Perhaps more importantly, the band seemed to be enjoying itself throughout the entire night.

Fallon wore a black Chicago White Sox t-shirt and called attention to it—much to the chagrin of the Brewers-loving crowd. Booing predictably followed, but he laughed it off. The crowd might have been better served turning a few of those boos onto themselves, particularly when some dick-with-ears decided it would be a good idea to whip a beer into the people packed near the stage. Fallon also later quieted a woman who had spent most of the night screaming for "The Backseat" by gently telling her: "I heard you. We're going to play it, so relax."

Watching Fallon smile as the band ripped through “The Patient Ferris Wheel” provided a break from the pathos that marks his lyrics, as did the band bringing out opening band Good Old War's Tim Arnold to play accordion for one song. The band can be serious, but this seriousness never threatens to suffocate its sound.

The group's cover of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” midway through the set may have seemed like an odd choice, but it speaks to the most fascinating aspect of The Gaslight Anthem: Its desire to reinterpret the sounds of the 1970s. Having no real personal recollection of this decade, the band is free to draw from such disparate sources as Petty, Darkness On The Edge Of Town-era Springsteen, and The Clash however it sees fit.