Burn, baby, burn

It's Bonfire Night, and the feeling's right...

This is the first time I've been inside Rock City since seeing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs here at the end of February. Far too long. It is, however, the first of three visits in the space of four days. Everything will be righted with the world.

By the time The Fiery Furnaces take to the stage, I'd imagined it'd be gettin' hot in here - but, as yet, the crowd is pretty sparse and, to be honest, Rough Trade's latest hopefuls don't do an awful lot to fan the fans' flames. Cut from a rather different cloth than the two other bands on the bill, The Fiery Furnaces deal in thumping drums, feral blues guitar and Eleanor Friedberger's rambling tales of lost dogs, amongst other things. 'Crystal Clear', the first single to be lifted from new LP Gallowsbird's Bark, is in this vein. They're at their most intriguing, if perhaps their most obtuse, however, when the bizarre whirling and lurching keyboards take over, as they often do. It's music to make you feel seasick, and I'd be prepared to give 'em another listen.

The crowd's response is lukewarm, though, but never fear - Franz Ferdinand are on hand to turn up the heat. A word of fire safety advice: with those extraordinary fringes, boys, you need to be steering well clear of naked flames tonight - so being sandwiched between The Fiery Furnaces and Hot Hot Heat isn't exactly ideal... There's an irrestistable peacock strut about the performance - no de rigeur bluesy swagger a la Jet here, just guitarist Nick McCarthy's eccentric spasms and debonair frontman Alex Kapranos's raised eyebrow. Songs like 'Shopping For Blood', 'Tell Her Tonight' and 'Take Me Out' (the new single, for which they're joined by Hot Hot Heat's Steve Bays) very definitely put the arch into Archduke. By the time 'Darts Of Pleasure' arrives to end the set, I'm musing over the possibility of a Battle of Britain between Franz Ferdinand of Glasgow and Sunderland's The Futureheads to establish the identity of the biggest new homegrown talent of the year. Being Mackems, Barry Hyde and company would probably be quite handy in a fist-fight, but it'd never get that far - FF's Alex wouldn't be prepared to get his shirt ripped and would just set the dogs on them.

Coming from a rather different direction (punk), Hot Hot Heat have arrived at much the same point as Franz Ferdinand - sharp, intelligent, vigorous and idiosyncratic guitar pop, which in HHH's case isn't a million miles away from The Dismemberment Plan. While at the Leeds festival incessant touring in support of their Make Up The Breakdown record appeared to have honed the band into a ferociously close-knit unit capable of delivering quite a punch, tonight their year and a half on the road is apparent in a rather less favourable way - put simply, they're clearly knackered and are counting the days until they can get home. That said, though, Steve Bays is still a whirlwind of hair and Elvis-Costello-style yelping, and it'd be extremely hard to strip songs like 'Get In Or Get Out', 'No, Not Now', 'Oh Godamnit', 'Le Le Low' and 'Naked In The City Again' of their tense energy even if you wanted to. Even after so long on tour, Dante DeCaro evidently still revels in the joy of scrawling guitar lines over the rhythm section like graffiti, while 'Save Us S.O.S', a song they've only just started playing again live, proves to be a real highlight - a supremely danceable At The Drive-In. As expected, a single-song encore of 'Bandages', ahem, wraps things up. The hope might have been that they'd set the place on fire, but overall they still managed to cook on about Gas Mark 5.