Crime And The City Solution are a timely reminder of an era when bands didn’t explode into our musical consciousness perfectly formed with a manifesto, a flawless first album and a festival tour already in the bag.

Formed by singer Simon Bonney in the late 1970’s and partly staffed by ex-Birthday Party bad seeds they spent the best part of a decade churning out introspective, Cave-esque slabs of post-punk blues to little effect before decamping to the brooding, pre-unification Berlin of the mid 1980’s.

It was here that the band, under Bonney’s increasingly assured direction, completed a tantalising triumvirate of albums, ‘Shine’, ‘The Bride Ship’ and ‘Paradise Discotheque’.

Inhabited by Bonney’s desolate baritone with its character-driven confessionals, Bronwyn Adams’ weeping, wracked violin and Alex Hacke’s ghostly blues guitar, the album’s evocations of regret and restrained, ruined majesty were, at their best, both brutal and bewitching. But it was on the group’s last album ‘Paradise Discothèque’ that they finally embraced their own nascent ambition.

Epitomised by the improbable opener ‘I Had A Gun’, possibly the only song in recorded history to flip from breezily acoustic country and western to desperate, metal dirge and back again, the album reels and revels in untrammelled invention.

The sleazily, swinging jazz sax of ‘The Sly Persuade’, the tremulous tabla and mournful mandolin of ‘The Sun Before The Darkness’ and the delicate piano ripples of ‘ The Dolphins and Sharks’ display the joy of a band unshackled.

Lyrically too, Bonney’s depictions grew in emotive resonance. Whether drawing bleakly, obsessive portraits of devotion such as ‘The Dolphins and The Sharks’ or wryly detailing the paranoiac megalomania of a fallen leader as in ‘The Last Dictator Part 1’ Bonney’s clear-sighted, poetic introspections provoke and disturb in equal measure.

Almost inevitably, however, the band’s ambition overreaches itself at points. The laboured bass and irritant toy-town keyboards of ‘The Last Dictator Parts 2 & 3’ sound ill-considered whilst Bonney’s lyrical narrative struggles to find focus, crushed by the weight of its own complexity.

In its final third ‘Paradise Discotheque’ starts to fall apart both musically and lyrically but Crime And The City Solution are still a band that demand your attention. They never made a perfect album, never had a manifesto and never played the festival circuit but there is a well-spring of haunting, heart-rending melancholia within this fascinating document. Accept its flaws. Treasure their music.

One of the problems with American Blog bands is that they seem to have the sell-by date of a bag of vegetables. From the moment Pitchfork has dug them up, they start to go off.

Not SLEIGH BELLS. Their album – released this week on MIA’s label (yes, I know! MIA has a label !?!?) – ‘Treats’ turns out to be surprisingly fresh. It is a proper piece of work, to whit, it’s not two Ok songs which were momentarily top of the Hype Machine chart and a load of old tat to pad it out.

There is some justification here for all the frothing and foaming praise which has surrounded them on the internet for the past nine months (especially in the wake of their CMJ appearance in New York last autumn).

‘Treats’ is a thoroughly modern record. I thought it was too stilted and awkward the first time I heard it; that it had the hallmarks of someone almost trying too hard to be artful and obtuse.

But actually this is one of the most forward-looking electro-guitar pop albums of the year (by turns it mixes Atari Teenage Riot with MIA, the Mary Chain and industrial hip-hop beats). It seems to constantly push you to the edge of your senses and then reels you back in. It wants to give you a headache and then sooth your brow.

Made by the duo Alexis Krauss and Derek E Miller, the latter the engineer and architect of the sound, it contains 11 tracks which never stand still. Pointedly it also has elements of the post hardcore scene Miller emerged from and even a hint of the fearlessness of Riot Grrl.

Best of all though it isn’t afraid to take a chance (which again is where 99 per cent of American Blog Rock really falls on its face and why I don’t get groups like Freelance Whales at all).

Sleigh Bells, although fixed within a self-imposed narrow sound, manage to twist it here, there and everywhere: from the jabbing Le Tigre-esque ‘Infinity Guitars’ to the beautifully subdued ‘Rill Rill’ (where Krauss’ vocals suddenly start to glow) and onto ‘Crown On The Ground’, a brilliant and blustery hip hop boxing anthem.

They topple over on only a couple of occasions (‘Straight As’, as wild as it sounds, isn’t as punk rock as it thinks it is and title track ‘Treats’ sounds almost as if they’ve worn themselves out). But this is a small price to pay when the competition is so rotten.

Sleigh hello at MySpace

The pictures on their website could honestly have been taken in the late ‘70s or at least the early ‘80s, which is an interesting entry point to YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS.

They look like they could fit into the era where bands played with their backs to the audience; when anonymity was an attitude (and not a disguise for acne or a lack of anything to say).

YBA are from Manchester, used to trade under a different name, and (a little disappointingly?) are “mostly influenced by American bands,” which would certainly explain the check shirts, but not the urgency inherent in their sound.

Recent single ‘Lived In Skin’ is one of my favourite records of the year so far. It’s an excitingly percussive-driven pop song, with an insistent spindly guitar line and a dry and partially buried British vocal. It races along, detailed and (nearly) danceable; an exhausting five minutes of scorched post-punk melody.

‘Million Miles’ on the flip, has a janglier, less angular side to it (a trace of the Americanisms?) with a slightly more mournful narrative and a less in your face feel. Meanwhile some of the reviews even describe them as “shoegazey but looking up at the stars.”

I like this sort of confusion. I like the way the blurb which came with the CD was Xeroxed and typewritten and ever so slightly enigmatic.

You sense serious young men at work; earnestly still trying to find out where they fit in (or better still don’t fit in). It’s very good.

We await gigs down south with growing excitement.

Young British Artists live here on myspace

Picture: YBA by Sanna Berger