The War on Drugs have been on the road for six months, and cabin fever may be taking its toll on their conversational abilities. "Me and Steven got new jeans in Holland," offers singer and guitarist Adam Granduciel by way of between-song banter, before reconsidering his offering: "I'm sorry, but every day is the same, and when anything different happens, we talk about it for weeks."

Thankfully, their music is less banal. The Philadelphia band major in a strain of simultaneously introspective and expansive guitar rock that is as indebted to classic rockers such as Neil Young and Tom Petty as it is to FX-pedal-heavy textured art-rock. Their recent, second album, Slave Ambient, sounds like Spiritualized reinterpreting the oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen – and makes that appear a very good idea indeed.

The band's co-founder, Kurt Vile, quit two years ago to pursue a solo career, but his departure does not appear to have stymied the amiable Granduciel. Possessed of an easy stoner charm beneath his forest of curly hair, he unleashes swooping torrents of effects and feedback over the motorik pulse of tracks such as Best Night and Your Love Is Calling My Name, while his adenoidal intonation on Baby Missiles, complete with a burst of ragged harmonica, is pure Dylan.

Not much happens during the War on Drugs' songs, but Granduciel is a quietly charismatic focus, lulling the audience into a blissed-out reverie and then jerking them out of it with the white-noise freakout encore of A Needle in Your Eye. By then, he has been more than forgiven his lack of small talk.