Wednesday 05/04/06 Graham Coxon, Duels @ Hammersmith Palais, London

With even Jarvis Cocker claiming he “can’t even remember Britpop”, it would be easy to look back on it as just a union-jack drenched flash in the pan. That’s where Duels step in: burning up Parkas and 90s indie with a petrol dousing of gravel-pit vocals, scuzzy riffs and beguiling electro hooks. Latest single ‘Animal’ is the glaring spotlight on their edgy darkness: compelling vocal interplay and bristling guitar mêlée in finely executed combat.

More endearing than a 'Cup-A-Soup' hug in a mug, Graham Coxon is ever the black-spectacled, reticently reluctant frontman. However, even with an album of adolescent punk girl rants, he has shaken off his bubble-bath cringes from the ‘Country House’ days and revealed some serious balls. While Albarn hides behind animated simians, Graham, ever awkward, starts by donning his in-cognito of choice: a wall of blistering noise in the feedback form of ‘Escape Song’. ‘Don’t Let Your Man Know’ pulses with paranoid palpitations at panic-attack speed, and ‘I Can’t Look at Your Skin’ is snarled with gobby 1977 belligerence.

Spitting contemptuously in the face of his own shy persona, Graham has scaled his former lo-fi to the heights of punchy Buzzcocks exuberance: a frenzied ‘Freakin Out’ and sweetly simplistic ‘Spectacular’ showcase his knack for searingly magnificent singles. There’s something so earnest and boyish about Coxon: de-spectacled by scissor kicks, he bundles bashfulness and angst into floor scrambling tantrums, pubescent paroxysms and charming walls of guitar noise. ‘You and I’ is a jovial heartbroken jaunt, battling with the understated live explosion ‘Bittersweet Bundle of Misery’s contemplatively pleasant gloom; while ‘Standing On My Own Again’ packs a punch to break hearts and mend them again with recklessly catchy guitar hooks.

A perhaps over long set falls as flat as tonight’s cardboard cut out crowd (think a decade of Shrove Tuesdays) with the woozy melancholia of ‘Just a State of Mind’ and ‘All Over Me’: while poignant and self aware on record, they limp uneasily live. ‘Life It Sucks’ brazenly blows the dust from dusky eyes with shouty, spiky underdog antagonism. The finale of The Ramones-do-‘Popscene’ ‘Right to Pop’ is enough to jolt John Peel from his grave and batter some sense through the nonchalant Palais perusers. The confrontation of clamour hurls into an encore of noisily persistent teenage prod in ‘People of The Earth’ and wistful stop-start charisma of ‘I Wish’. ‘Who the ****?’ sums it up: Coxon’s show is a gloriously contradictory bundle of angst, anguish and gorgeous, inhibited intensity.