Pop My Vitriol *** Roadhouse, Manchester

My Vitriol opened their 40-minute set with their last single, Always Your Way, their punkish youthfulness and thrashy guitars redolent of early Ash with a touch of Rage thrown in. But My Vitriol are not as caustic as their name suggests. They break up their well-structured compositions by dropping in drifting strings, with plenty of distortion and delay, and simple but nifty bass-lines. This is staying-in and going-out music at the same time.

Even when the guitars started wailing again, and the drummer sounded as if he was battering a biscuit tin, the strong melodies prevented the songs from tumbling into a grungy obscurity. This was partly due to the clear vocals of frontman Som Wardner, which lie nicely over the fast, brash guitars and offer catchy refrains and harmonies worthy of Teenage Fan Club before they ran out of songs.

Indeed, My Vitriol's new single Cemented Shoes takes the best of the Fannies, roughs them up and spirals towards a crazed finale. Dreamy guitar hooks and clever vocal nuances usher the song into ballad territory, only for it to speed up with all the mad defiance of a car going the wrong way up the motorway.

Favouring long intros, the four-piece slowly develop bass and drums beneath a sharp riff, and it's the combination of this navel-gazing and hysterical abandonment that has led some to compare them to US underground bands. The music is all edges, and the despair is there if you want to tap into it, but there's a jauntiness to My Vitriol that means they stomp up a formidable kind of pop-rock.