Yeah Yeah Yeahs: OK

And in filed the Nottingham Socialites two by two, with their asymmetrical hairstyles and "individual" approach to clothing - for two hours, at least, they could go to Rock City safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't have to couch their enjoyment in irony or mingle with The Great Unhip. Karen O's got a lot to answer for.

OK, to the music. Whereas other cities had the pleasure of witnessing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Ikara Colt together in an art-trash marriage made in heaven, us East Midlanders were deprived even of supposed support act Cranebuilders. Instead we had to make do with a fat moustachioed Ron Jeremy lookalike who eventually stripped to a pair of blue Y-fronts and whose stageshow consisted of lyrical muckiness, prodigious perspiration and proclamations of his own greatness at the end of every song. Yes, it could only have been Har Mar Superstar. By the end of a half-hour set, his one joke (being a parodic smuttily unwholesome male Peaches) had worn extremely thin, with a Stevie Wonder cover, new single 'Power Lunch' and a track co-written with The Faint leaving me, well, flaccid. Beck did the whole 'postmodern white-boy-does-Prince pastiche' thing with far more wit and panache on Midnite Vultures ('Debra' is a particular favourite of mine), and look what happened to him - he was crucified for it. Still, this guy's got guts (as well as a large gut) - ritual humiliation every night must be hard to take.

If only the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had been as unequivocally and resoundingly good as their moniker promises. The 'Master' EP remains for me one of the best singles of last year, and they rampaged through all five tracks. On first listen 'Bang' and 'Our Time' in particular sounded brilliantly fresh, announcing the arrival of an exciting new talent - and live they were thrillingly primal and raw. 'Art Star', though, lost what (admittedly) little subtlety it has on record. Karen O might have an, ahem, "unique" vocal style, but she was a magnetic presence onstage, one minute with her hands on hips, the next bouncing up and down shrieking lines like "As a fuck, son, you suck" over tribal drumbeats and the abrasive arty Blues Explosion riffs of Nick Zinner, who looks like William Reid of The Jesus & Mary Chain if he'd been locked in a cupboard without food for a week. But the suspicion persists that the new material due to appear on forthcoming album Fever To Tell isn't quite in the same league as the likes of 'Miles Away' and 'Machine', and playing 'Our Time' as the single encore song simply underlined my feeling - it might well be their time to be hated, but, with just two singles under their belt, it's not their time to be trying to blow people away as headliners in Rock City's main room, especially when they don't seem to know how to end any of their songs. You've got to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.