First Night: Modest Mouse, Royal Albert Hall, London

The yawing gap between British and American rock has been laid bare by the reaction to the former Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr's band. Modest Mouse, and their singer-songwriter, Isaac Brock, are 15-year veterans of the US indie scene who, with Marr as their latest member, have just seen their fifth album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, top the US charts.

Over there, this is seen as part of a growing, healthy trend for odd, musically ambitious outsiders to challenge the mainstream's numb conservatism. Here, we just wonder if Morrissey's jealous. For all the growing subtlety of Arctic Monkeys, and literate street-life reportage of other current British bands, we are not producing much of Modest Mouse's musical complexity. Marr's mooted move to the band's home in Portland, Oregon, may be a symbolically despairing, as well as practical, exit.

Brock is a barking, bruising frontman, in the viscerally intense tradition of Eighties US hardcore punks. But for all the brontosaurus roar with which his band begin, the new single, "Dashboard", is soon enough losing itself in Marr's lilting Afro-funk guitar. Synthesised keyboard effects curl between it, making Marr turn, curious himself, to listen.

Modest Mouse seem like a laboratory, splicing subtly different guitar styles, trying to patent a fresh, mutant sound. Marr in particular, spotlighted while Brock stayed in the shadows, shifts between low, slow riffs and high, ringing ripples. With Brock's guitar as his foil, and twin drummers driving Modest Mouse on, lyrics become just another layer. "Fire It Up" describes drunken excess and rebellion, "We've Got Everything" the ignorant emptiness of our surfeited consumer society. The album's title seems appropriate to this biblical sense of a culture fit to be washed away.

Talking Heads (with whom Marr also worked) is the closest blueprint. The comparison shows Modest Mouse's faults as well as virtues. For all the band's fervent American cult, they lack the unique, precisely perverse world view of a David Byrne - or the young Morrissey. They do, though, have an ability to rock in a way those men could not, a thunderous, fast way young Americans always understand. When you hear Marr's Smith's-era, melodic jangle at its heart, the gulf he has crossed to stand in this company becomes clear.

As Brock plays his guitar with his teeth, in the hall where Jimi Hendrix once did the same, both men appear rejuvenated by the unlikely bond. More such exchange schemes are desperately needed, if Anglo-American pop's special creative relationship is to be revived. Modest Mouse aren't that good. But at least they're aiming for the stars.