Liverpool’s hottest prospects, Avenging Force offer something completely different to the umbrella of La’s-inspired bands who have shadowed the city for so long. The fuzz-filled songs that coat this Steve Albini produced debut couldn’t be further from the nice-but-shallow sea shanties by The Coral/Zutons et al.

Taking The Who’s monumental Live At Leeds album as inspiration, the band employs the same gusto and virtuosity that Townshend, Moon and Entwistle riffed on so effortlessly on their best long-player. But they go much further than simply ripping it off. Live At Leeds was a motherfucker of a forward-thinking album anyway, and hardly retro sounding. What this album does is to take the blueprint of Leeds – basically to play faster, harder and with more passion than anyone else ever – and add touches of American alt-rock (The Melvins, Hüsker Dü), classic British melancholy and a bit of ESG’s rhythmic brilliance.

It’s a menacing mix, and what makes the band a really exciting prospect is their ability to extract melodic beauty from musical mayhem – best illustrated on tracks like ‘Illingtown’, which is 1 minute 46 seconds of screams, tribal drums, tempo changes and distortion. Weirdly, the whole thing is completely hummable. It’s not a one-off either. The entire album owes a huge debt to melody, and you sense that whoever writes the songs knows enough about their craft to let the rhythms, rhymes and tunes do as much talking as the feedback and demonic chanting.  

If the band were around a few years ago then they may well have been lumped in with the short-lived and terribly christened No Name scene along with bands like Mclusky, Ikara Colt and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. Who knows if that would have been a good thing (or, indeed, if it would have happened at all), but there is a definite link between The Avenging Force and the kinetic, tense, anxiety-ridden and oddly humorous melting pot of sometimes brilliant music created by those bands. A lot of that undoubtedly comes down to the band's ability to play well together as a group, but it’s also evident in Albini's production which keeps the vocals low and the drums high.  

You can just taste the devilish smiles that the producer coaxed out of the band during recording sessions too – not least on instrumental closer ‘Bootle Girls’ and album highlight ‘Muscle Man’, both of which are undeniably power rock, but unashamedly so. It’s unusual to hear such menacing, fucked-up glee gained from playing a piece of wood (sorry, guitar) in modern music, but that’s the exact spirit that Avenging Force have managed to capture on this record. (Matt Wilkinson)

www.myspace.com/aforce