Walking into Jammin’ Java Friday night, here’s what I knew about Philly rockers Marah:

1) High Fidelity and About a Boy author Nick Hornby, a man who has documented his musical preferences at least enough for me to know I largely share them, loves on this band so much he devoted one of his book columns in Believer magazine a couple of years ago to their largely unsung magnificence.

1a) Stephen King —Josh Ritter fan No. 1, y’alls! — likes them, too. (Relevance? None. But just try finding a feature on Marah from the last seven years that doesn’t mention it.)

2) Some people, notably High Fidelity and About a Boy author and Believer columnist Nick Hornby; less notably, one of my boxing pals; think they sound vaguely like Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

With such unimpeachable endorsements in hand, I deemed the deck sufficiently stacked in favor of a rewarding night of music to venture west; across the river, beyond the Beltway, to Vienna, site of my junior prom dinner, among other notable episodes from history.

It was worth the trip. Marah, newly outfitted with a (temporary?) sixth member, keyboardist Christine Smith, are such a perfect synthesis of worthy antecedents — Springsteen and the E Street Band, sure; but also the Replacements, for their constant struggle between aggression and tender emotion; the Faces (Rod Stewart has sucked for longer than I’ve been alive, but he didn’t always); and maybe the Drive By Truckers, if only because they seem to be the only band still peddling that triple-axe “guitarmonies” thing — that prior familiarity with their material isn’t required.

Ordinarily when I know I’m going to write about a show I’ll jot down snatches of lyrics from any tunes I don’t recognize so I can look them up later. This proved agreeably impossible with Marah, as the sound mix was set perfectly for band like this, which is to say, crashing drums and searing guitars way up; vocals and keyboard way down. A flip through my notebook reveals that a many of the songs contained such singular flourishes of the the pen as “Hey hey hey!” and “Sha-na-NA-na-na.” Nothing here as unmistakable as, say, “Yellow custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye,” unfortunately, but I tried Googling them anyway.