Reuben

It's like Rock Idol in here tonight. In the red corner, spraying heat and hysteria over the braying crowd, we give you Colour Of Fire. And in the blue corner, reigning champions of the teen-rawk scene, the relentlessly chipper Reuben. Both are supposedly our future heroes, the Next Big Thing™. But both teeter on that perilous line between success and failure, mere moments from revving their engines, zooming skywards and claiming their place among the stars, or losing their balance and plummeting into never-were oblivion.

Colour Of Fire should be stars. They look like coiffed and dog-collared early Manics fans and sound like a sugary Glassjaw. How deliciously, absurdly brilliant! But compare them to King Adora, and watch their faces turn purple. They can't stand it. Even the best-intentioned accuracy hurts, and they do echo everyone's favourite lippy-smeared Brummie bricklayers. It's the snarls and yelps, more lascivious than angry. It's the way their PixiesProphetsStooges racket is more glammy than reactionary, and most of all, the fact that they're gloriously, helplessly teenage.

The kids already know this. Check out the crowd: Manics, Placebo, Easyworld fans, a bright-eyed legion that craves a starspun melody and a skinny idol with tumbleweed hair far more than a manifesto from another self-important antirebel. CoF's songs do the talking - howling guitar explosions, pierced by a hail of bullet beats and splendidly snotty dual vocals that idolise Daryl Palumbo. But even as CoF holler "we don't like decisions", decision time approaches. Trying to be several things at once, they risk missing the mark completely. They have a choice: strain for adulthood and cultivate a styled and nonchalant stance, or stay young and scream and rage to their hearts' content. Being cool might get them more kudos for now, but cool people get old and unfashionable; perhaps sincerity will better favour them in the long term.

For proof of this, look no further than Reuben. At times their demeanor is wide-eyed and Pollyanna-esque - we can ALL feel the love in this room. The devotion of Reuben's fans is no mystery; when you thank everyone you've ever met, and send personal shout-outs to fans for trekking down from Edinburgh for the gig, they're gonna return that love. Unless you really suck. And Reuben really don't. A year and a half ago, they were a granule of promise, hidden within the folds of a formless, noisy mess. The potential was there, but goddamn, getting at it was gonna hurt.

Actually it was relatively painless. A year or so on, Reuben hit the mark with razor-sharp, laser precision. The clumsy guitar hooks have gotten sharp and uncompromising, layered beneath ebullient frontman Jamie's freeform, pebbledash vocals. When Reuben score, they're eye-wateringly accurate; the hostile and ludicrously catchy 'Let's Stop Hanging Out' renders all of Reuben's peers weak and irrelevant. But tonight's set is punctuated with bland fillers, a waste considering they have glowing songs like 'Scared Of The Police' in their arsenal that they don't even use tonight. Their fire and fervour saves the day, infusing the entire room with enthusiasm, but it's not tight enough to take them to the next level, and since they've proved themselves more than worthy of rock's crown jewels, Reuben should have progressed a little further than this by now.