I don’t listen to music in headphones that often, but some kind of meeting nearby has meant the stereo has been switched off this morning, and I’ve been forced to listen to the high-end fuzz attack of Times New Viking up close. Pretty bracing start to the day, as you might imagine, though it does occur to me that this band’s abrasiveness can be somewhat overplayed. If you’re not completely up to speed on the exciting micro-genre of shitgaze, Ohio’s Times New Viking are one of the scene’s leading ambassadors, along with the somewhat shadily-linked Psychedelic Horsehit. There are also a bunch of affinities with The Smell bands I keep going on about, especially the mighty No Age – TNV are actually touring the UK from next week with No Age, which should be a good show, if you can manage to miss Los Campesinos, anyway. Anyway, TNV’s new “Stay Awake” EP is just about the best thing they’ve done, I reckon, not least because it encapsulates their unsteady, strangely cute noisepop. Listened to these artful little indie songs assailed by billowing staticky blasts, you’ll probably be reminded of any number of lo-fi things from the early ‘90s: Guided By Voices, maybe circa “Propeller”, are clearly a big influence (which reminds me of another current band who are on this trip, Sic Alps). But there’s also something oddly mid-‘80s about the likes of “Sick & Tyred” and “Pagan Eyes”. There’s a fair bit of blog hype around at the moment for a band called The Vivian Girls, who might as well exist solely to remind me that, no matter how hard I tried, I could never really summon up much enthusiasm for The Shop Assistants. What’s interesting about Times New Viking, though, is that they energetically remind me of the possibilities suggested by The Jesus & Mary Chain back in the day, of a time when endless hack talk of “candy” and “serrated edges” seemed exciting rather than corny. It’s fuzzpop, ostensibly, but much better than most of that stuff actually sounded. And for something so hip and cutting edge, so self-consciously rackety, it also sounds charmingly quaint, of all things, redolent of a time when an indie band embracing pop meant that they smuggled an old bubblegum melody in under the feedback rather than hired Mark ‘Spike’ Stent or whoever and worked like murder to sell a million. Just before I plugged into this, someone was playing the new Killers single on their computer. From a distance, through tinny speakers, it sounded weirdly like an electropop Chris De Burgh. In that context, an aggressive lack of commercial ambition, coupled with a bunch of needling tunes like those of Times New Viking, has rarely sounded so appealing.

A bit late in the day, but I just got round to reading a couple of things in this morning's Guardian. One is Matt Bolton's piece on the class war in British indie. The other is Alexis Petridis' customarily thought-provoking review of Oasis' "Dig Out Your Soul". I'm not going to bother saying much about "Dig Out Your Soul", other than that while it's certainly better than the last one, you could easily slip a couple of the tracks from the new Pete Best Band album in place of some of Andy Bell, Gem and Liam Gallagher's tracks without anyone noticing much; has any supposed born-again democrat ever so shamelessly frontloaded an album in his favour as Noel G does here? But read Stephen Trousse's much better-informed review here. What those Guardian pieces made me think about was an irritation that working-class music, whatever that is, should not, according to Gallagher, be experimental. As if anything other than foursquare Beatles rips are somehow "unsuitable" things for the proletariat to engage in. It strikes me that one of Oasis' fundamental strengths is that they have been aspirational: that they make themselves and their fans believe they can live forever, or at least drive brown Rolls Royces and live in Primrose Hill. But what bugs me is how it is still, in their credo, authentically working-class to send your children to private school, to be conspicuously as rich as Croesus. And yet not authentically working-class to mess about with musical orthodoxies a little bit. Or read books. In the Matt Bolton piece, James McMahon rightly cites Manic Street Preachers as an example of a working-class band who aimed to culturally transcend their background (not that I can stand any of their music, but I do admire them on some levels). But there's still this weird assumption that middle-class bands don't "want" "it" as much. Maybe they don't. Maybe "wanting it" is some bogus manifestation of the authenticty obsession that always strikes me as being so wrong-headed. Maybe middle-class bands can afford to experiment. Whatever. But if the only thing stopping working-class bands taking musical risks is financial exigencies, it doesn't say much for the sort of rebel credentials so many of them use so assiduously in their marketing, does it?

They should have just started a 35-date European tour as guests of The Hold Steady, who pulled all their shows earlier this week due to the hospitalisation of guitarist Tad Kubler. Instead, Philadelphia’s War On Drugs find themselves stranded in London, where they were probably considering busking as an alternative to starving on the capital’s streets before being added at the last minute to tonight’s Club Uncut bill at the Borderline. I’m sympathetic to their current circumstances and being left on their uppers by the cancellation of the Hold Steady tour and the exposure it would have brought them is no joke in anyone’s language. At the same time, I’m wholly glad they’re here tonight, because what their opening set, a frantic 30 minutes or so, packed from floor to ceiling with moments of startling rapture and abandoned mayhem, is as good as anything I’ve seen all year. You may have read in reviews of their debut album, Wagonwheel Blues, that WOD’s music occupies an interface between the classic American songwriting of Dylan, Springsteen and Tom Petty and the sonic adventures of The Velvet Underground, say, or My Bloody Valentine. It’s a notion you may briefly have entertained and them dismissed without hearing the album as surely fanciful. The thing is, the description – especially when you hear them live – isn’t at all far-fetched, begins in fact to feel like it actually undersells a lot of the amazing things they get up to and the fearsome noise of which they are capable, breathtakingly exciting aural landscapes wrought from nothing more apparently than a Rickenbacker, a drummer with the dynamic whack of the young Mitch Mitchell, an acoustic guitar and what looks like an array of wired-up kitchen utensils one of the band must have found at the back of someone’s garage. They’ve just started “Arms Like Boulders”, which also opens Wagonwheel Blues, when I arrive hot-foot from Pete Molinari’s Uncut promotion at Borders and they are already in full flight, Adam Granduciel, looking beneath a tangle of hair uncannily at times like lost West Coast singer-songwriter Dino Valente, whaling away on a battered acoustic guitar, the band whipping up a firestorm behind him. You can hear echoes in his voice of Petty, for sure, but the exclamatory phrasing, daring and acute, is more noticeably reminiscent of a Dylan just gone electric and simply buzzing. You can hear Dylan in the following “Taking The Farm”, but here the backing sounds like a demented version of Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, warped, furious, insanely catchy. As is, you’d have to say, the somewhat more serene drift of “Buenos Aires Beach” they’re playing now, its warm glow an overture to the absolute meltdown of the 10-minute “Show Me The Coast” they play next. Years ago, in Glasgow, I saw Dylan play a version of “Masters Of War”, whose arrangement that night seemed inspired by the Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song”. Tonight, War On Drugs give us a hint of what it might have sounded like if Bob had appeared on “Sister Ray”, whose relentless annihilation is fearsomely replicated. They end with an equally fierce version of “A Needle In Your Eye #16”, which Granduciel reminds the audience appeared on Uncut’s Let It Roll CD that accompanied “issue 152, the one with Liam or Noel Gallagher, the ugly brother, whoever he is” on the cover. War On Drugs have been so good that what follows has an almost inevitable air of anti-climax. The Dudes are loud and rocky, two of them sport unfashionable moustaches and severe haircuts and a third is wearing an AC/DC T-shirt. I’d been expecting some bar band rumble, but they turn out, surprisingly, to be more Queen than Crazy Horse. On one number with a typically big chorus, they even attempt a kind of “Radio Ga Ga” clap-along. Vancouver’s Ladyhawk are louder and hairier, their between-song banter makes them sound like characters from South Park and with names like Duffy Driediger, Darcy Hancock and Sean Hawryluk, they would not be out of place among Thomas Pynchon’s intrepid Chums Of Chance in Against The Day.