Credit: Found On Internet

Once again, Music Towers arrives too late to the party to catch Future Of The Left. Rising from the ashes of one of Music Towers’ old favourites, Mclusky, whenever we’ve tried to catch FOTL live, something has stopped us. The tube was delayed. We got the stage times wrong. We got drunk and fell asleep on the train and woke up in Surrey. And tonight we roll up to the Electric Ballroom in Camden just in time to get caught up in the rush for the bar after their set has finished.

But we did arrive in time to catch all of Against Me! (that’s their exclamation mark, not mine), Florida’s prime proponent of folk-punk agit-pop. The black-clad four-piece are over here in the UK to promote their fourth studio album ‘New Wave’ and Music Towers is here to catch the final night.

There’s complexity and depth to Against Me! songs – there’s certainly more substance to their punk rock ethics than more mindless sloganeering. ‘American Abroad’ shows they’ve got self-awareness that they tie in with a Pogues-esque punk stomp, when vocalist Tom Gabel sings that “wherever we go, Coca-Cola's already been”, before quipping of the Americans Abroad of the title, “while I hope I'm not like them, I'm not sure”. But they’re delivered by music that’s so lacking in pretension and welcoming, it practically demands a beery yobbish sing-a-long.

And that’s their USP. Tonight, people are having fun. The kids jumping around at the front are doing it in shared joy – this isn’t at all like a traditional mosh pit. There is none of the controlled release of aggression that makes a mosh pit look like a fight to those unaccustomed to living a life of blood, sweat and beers. Even the people who don’t know the words are singing along to the chorus of ‘Thrash Unreal’. It’s the kind of song that drunk strangers put their arms over each others’ shoulders and spill beer to, as they sing along as loudly as they can.

If you could strap Gogol Bordello down to an operating table, and strip away all their OTT gypsy-isms, all that folk rock energy left behind would look like the building blocks that Against Me! have built themselves from. They might not be running around the stage like a gang of hyperactive children given a lunch of sugar and Red Bull – because they’ve got the kind of songs that’ll have the audience doing it for them.