Metro Choice: Check out Echobelly

Echobelly may be the most politically correct pop band in Britain, sporting a female Asian singer and black lesbian guitarist, but this doesn't stop them wigging out in a gorgeously tuneful post-grunge fashion. Although singer Sonya Aurora-Madan obviously owns a well-thumbed copy of The Complete Sing-A-Long-A-Morrissey, her lyrics, about patriarchy and arranged marriages, give a very Nineties spin to the thundering band, and Smiths-style moping doesn't get a look in. This year's debut album, Everyone's Got One, is finer even than Blur's Parklife and proves what kids knew: that the British music scene is a vibrant, live thing. Fight hard for tickets for Tuesday's one-off gig at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road (071-434 0403): if their modern masterpiece 'Insomniac' doesn't thrill you to your boots, then you must be dead.

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