Album: The Vines

Highly Evolved, Heavenly

Few hot prospects could be as reliably tipped for success as Australian quartet the Vines, one of those rare bands who seem to have everything going for them, right from the off. In a few short months, they've gone from day-jobs at a Sydney branch of McDonald's to appearing on Late Night with David Letterman, a show that rarely takes fliers on longshot prospects.

Like Supergrass, they offer a microwaved blend of (predominantly Sixties) pop and rock influences, shot through with a million-volt jolt of fizzing punk energy. Imagine the mutant musical love-child of Arthur Lee and Kurt Cobain, and you'll get some idea of the power coursing through the 12 tracks on Highly Evolved. Produced by alt.rock specialist Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Foo Fighters), it veers sharply between pungent buzzsaw punk riffs ("Outtathaway!", "Get Free"), wistful folk-rock reveries ("Autumn Shade", "Country Yard"), and a strain of acid-laced psychedelia that sounds like what Nirvana might have come up with if they'd been prog-rockers rather than punks ("In the Jungle").

The singer/guitarist Craig Nicholls is the pivotal figure in the band, a songwriter as potent and prolific as Ryan Adams, touched with that indefinable otherness that marks out rock's gifted innocents. Nicholls's songs reveal a streak of anxiety and alienation that probably comes from an over-fondness for the bong; he seems like the kind of soul that takes the mildest of slights to heart, and builds mountains of hurt out of molehills of rejection. Even the prospect of riding off free into the sunset in "Get Free" is tinged with regret: "She never loved me," he reflects bitterly, "why should anyone?"

Mostly, though, he seems to like being left alone. The most beautiful tracks here are "Autumn Shade", a paean to blissful solitude – "Slip into the autumn shade/ I could sleep for days" – wrapped up in two minutes of gentle West Coast harmonies and soaring psychedelic guitars; and "Country Yard", a lazy, back-porch rumination reminiscent of the Kinks' rustic period. The latter finds Nicholls sounding slightly guilty, "tired of feeling sick and useless", yet ultimately assured that "I don't really need to change".

For all his apparent preference for a quiet rural life and a head full of pipe-dreams, Nicholls can't help being energised by metropolitan life, even as he's repelled by it. "There ain't no room for me in the city/ The lights go down and it looks so pretty," he sings in "Ain't No Room", caught between conflicting impulses. It's a temperament perhaps best reflected in "Sunshinin'", a song which evokes much the same sinister-sunshine mood as Love's Forever Changes, brimful of lazy, summery energy, but streaked with overheated anxiety and wariness.