Album of the week: Glasvegas

GLASVEGAS: GLASVEGAS
***
COLUMBIA, £11.99

HYPEMASTER Alan McGee knew exactly what he was doing when, last autumn, he blogged about "the most exciting thing I've heard since The Jesus & Mary Chain" (officially, the most exciting Scottish band of all time). He was giving Glasvegas one canny kickstart to a career which, to that point, had consisted of the usual mix of unheralded local gigs and general indifference. Overnight, there were comparisons to McGee's previous big discovery, Oasis. Less than a year later, they are poised to release their debut album, riding on the back of the most enthusiastic reception accorded a Scottish band since the emergence of Franz Ferdinand.

Along the way, they have packed out the Futures Tent at T In The Park, received a Q Award nomination for Best New Act and already bagged the NME Radar Award, chosen by the writers and usually a decent gauge of a band about to break big. Plus Lisa Marie Presley is their drinking buddy – quite a surreal circumstance for a group who have built their sound on classic pop and rock'n'roll foundations.

Glasvegas themselves appear to be keeping the heid amid the hullabaloo. Black clad and unsmiling, they are fronted by the shrewd James Allan, a former semi-professional footballer who has transferred his energies to that other creative passion of the working class. While his band's supporters seem to be getting carried away with hype, you have to salute Allan's single-minded pursuit of a Wall of Sound with a distinctly Scottish flavour.

Musically, Glasvegas trail in the Mary Chain's wake with their pounding rhythms and girl group-influenced melodies enveloped in distorted guitar noise. But where the Reid brothers' cacophony was chaotic and thrilling, Glasvegas aspire to be epic. Eschewing the Mary Chain's drug metaphors, Allan pens stark, kitchen-sink lyrics inspired by his East End background, which are at odds with the stately melancholy of the music.

His focus is mainly on the prevailing culture of machismo among Scottish men and, in particular, its effect on adolescents. From its opening couplet ("how you're my hero, how you're never here though"), current single Daddy's Gone captures the sadness and bitterness of a son with an absentee father.

Go Square Go, an early single, wrestles with the playground dilemma of fight or flight – "don't you wait for the bell to ring ding-a-ling-a-ling, one step forward then a bada-bada-bing" – and is musically about as sophisticated as that argument. The protagonist of Stabbed could be that same lad a few years later, spouting a mix of bravado and fear, intoned by Allan over the soothing strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. It's a surprisingly effective device and the subject matter is both ageless and current, given statistics about the number of young men stabbed in the UK.

One of the more potent forays into this territory was inspired by the murder of Kriss Donald in 2004, in particular the news footage of his grieving mother. On Flowers & Football Tops, Allan deftly flips the convention of the yearning love lyric to produce something darker and more tragic.

Recent single Geraldine attempts the same trick, sounding at first like a romantic declaration of loving support: "When your sparkle evades your soul, I'll be at your side to console, when you're standing on the window ledge, I'll talk you back from the edge". However, the final reveal that "my name is Geraldine, I'm your social worker" is hamfisted, even quite comical. It is surely only a matter of time before someone hatches a Glasvegas spoof – broad accents, leather jackets, a few references to getting chibbed and you're away. It's the mark of a band with a strong identity.

Another Allan trait is a tendency to disregard meter and cram as many words as he can into a line. It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry, a pint of self-loathing in a Spectorish setting, contains some lyrical howlers, but it also has its moments, such as the Arab Strap/Arctic Monkeyesque "I tally up tonight's strangers and stragglers that I've kissed… it's all about going out and getting pissed with eagle eyes and sincerity bottom on my list".

Elsewhere, Polmont On My Mind is a rather poetic spin on Johnny Cash's prison songs, Lonesome Swan teeters on the cusp of indie banality and S.A.D. Light recalls The Blue Nile's melancholy urban romanticism. Despite the preceding catalogue of misery, the album does end on a determined note with Ice Cream Van's call to "bring back the glory days, active citizenship and pure community, freedom of faith".

Next stop for the Glasvegas juggernaut: a Christmas album recorded in Transylvania. Should be some party.