O Fracas - 'Fits & Starts' (I Can Count) Released 19/05/08

We live in interesting times. The more what-we-used-to-call 'indie' becomes formulaic and typecast, the more other artists are prepared to explore the leftfield. Crystal Castles, Fuck Buttons and These New Puritans are just three groups thriving due to a concerted effort to create genre-defying, interesting new sounds. Even more encouraging is the eagerness of music fans to match this determination to explore with a desire to seek out the best new artists, faster and more passionately than ever before.

With Hype Machine, MySpace, Del.icio.us and Last.FM, just a few of the online platforms available to make that search more easier and genres splitting and crashing into each other like supernovas, 2008 is not just shaping up to be a classic year for new music. It's starting to feel like we are living through a whole new New Wave.

We can now add Leeds' O Fracas to the list of brave new bands . Never ones to take a straight-forward approach to a song when they can wrap it in a spaghetti junction of sporadic melodies, O Fracas have produced an appropriately-titled debut of sharp, discordant pop that literally bursts out in fits and starts. Like a possessed sat nav, the O Fracas approach seems to be stop-start, fast-turn, reverse and repeat. On 'Fact Finding', 'What Jim Hears' and 'Brouhaha' they rush around like guitar-wielding headless chickens. The gorgeous (and impressively titled) 'And So a Scratch Runs Down a Wall' impresses with off-kilter Franz Ferdinand fun. While even introspective numbers like 'Zeroes and Ones' and 'Sixteen Beats' can't resist a giddy undercurrent of mischief. Only the absorbing 'You Can Hear The World From Menwith Hill', complete with school-hall piano and drifting melancholy, manages to avoid the joyous ruckus.

Judders of spiky guitar à la Foals, Klaxons choruses and a delicious pop heritage close to the Mystery Jets will be instant hook points for listeners, but dig deeper and you'll find a vast array of sounds that split and freak across a delicious pop landscape. African rhythms, DC hardcore, funk and jazz fusion are all is all hinted at. And while they're not as brazen with the world influences as, say, Yeasayer - the rough-around-the-edges lo-fi is too dominant - their g.php of a multitude of different styles and the ability to merge them together into three minutes without sounding like a cacophonic dirge is tantalising.

And yet while O Fracas should be rewarded for attempting something so different from the norm, at times 'Fits & Starts' feels too clever for its own good. If only they would just sometimes be patient enough to settle with one melody before sprinting off to the next. 'Train Track', an interlude of Steve Reich building repetition, sounds fresh from soundtracking a silent movie. You can imagine the damsel in distress being tied to railway tracks by the evil villain while the train hurtles towards her. It hints at Michael Nyman's score for Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, Man With A Movie Camera, and while it provides a welcome rest from the erratic behaviour elsewhere on 'Fits & Starts', at just fifty seconds long it frustratingly finishes premature before fulfilling its promise.