There are two Americas. There is the one that you find when you get there where people keep saying “I’m sorry sir but do you speak English?” and the one thing harder to find than a decent beer is a decent cup of tea. Such was my experience anyway. Then there’s the other more mythic one where Jack Kerouac and a bunch of charismatic taciturn loners drive herds of cattle to Wyoming and that sort of thing. It’s the latter of which The Low Anthem sing. It probably makes for better material than songs about a grumpy Irishman confronted with a herbal teabag in a cup of tepid water.

2009 is shaping up to be their year. As well as selling out their first two London shows – admittedly in a pub – they get a plug on this site and will be supporting Bruce Springsteen in front of millions of people in London next month. This is on account of them having produced the best album of the year so far. Their track Charlie Darwin was the standout song on the recent Rough Trade compilation to the extent that buying their album without having heard anything  else was a no brainer. It does not disappoint. Its balance is more towards fragile delicate intense songs but has one or two numbers that would lead you to believe that Walter Brennan is fronting a jug band after a hard day driving the chuck wagon.

Their London debut was last night and Thursday was their second ever European show. It’s easy to get a bit hyberbolic about how good they are. If their eponymous album has not gone multi platinum by Christmas we’ll have to conclude that humanity is morally bankrupt, emotionally sterile and probably deserves catastrophic climate change. The band describe it as a “mixed up gospel record with a bit of science” and it makes no attempt to conceal its debt to either the American religious or troubadour traditions. Ben Knox Miller has one of the most distinctively ethereal voices voices you are ever likely to hear and on occasion his delivery took your breath away. On a five star rating any honest observer would have given tonight’s show twelve.

After such a stupendous set the band deserved multiple encores instead of being allowed to slink off the stage. It’s an outrage that they didn’t receive them . It is a dead certainty that they will at their next show at the Union Chapel.