...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Astoria, London

Nearly off the Richter scale

Earlier in the week the much-lauded Ryan Adams badly blotted his copybook when he sat on the Astoria stage mumbling into his mic, unable and unwilling to project into the audience. Adams could certainly learn something about showmanship from ...Trail of Dead, four deceptively fresh-faced young Texans with matching mod haircuts. They take the stage, antagonised and inflamed, as the all-enveloping assault of their signature debut recording, "Richter Scale Madness", takes hold. From there they become progressively more unhinged, changing instruments between songs, engaging in incoherent but unmistakably angry diatribes, drawing the audience into their performance and finally jettisoning drumkit and guitars from the stage.

That the whole unashamedly theatrical spectacle lasts barely 40 minutes is part of the appeal. Working at a pitch of intensity most young bands can only dream of, ...Trail of Dead ensure maximum impact.

Raised in the heartland of Bible-belt America, the band formed in Austin, Texas, a musical Mecca with an innate conservatism. A formidable rebuke to both those backgrounds and the prevailing trends in US rock, the band have claimed to be exploring an affinity between guitar-based extremism and primitive folk musics and traditions. A song such as "Gargoyle Waiting" may draw on a fascination with anthropological study, but in the raw and unforgiving heat of a show that has its roots in the sonic blitzkrieg of early Who and the Stooges, such conceptual baggage hardly matters.

The sound is tormented but exhilarating – searing rotor riffs let loose from Neil Busch's Flying V guitar while Conrad Keely screams: "Gimme, gimme, gimme... I want more." Their obsessive dedication often brings them to the edge of their sound and the stage; they teeter on the brink of collapse while gleefully engaged in full, flaring attack.

Although "Another Stoner Morning" and "Baudelaire", from the forthcoming third album, Source Tags and Codes, suggest musical growth, there's an essential youthfulness about ...Trail of Dead. Comparisons to the underground pioneers Sonic Youth seem inappropriate, as they lack the latter's cerebral, harmonically inclined experimentation and pompous attitude. Indeed, the young cross-gender crowd make the tumescent rush that's implicit in ...Trail of Dead's performance clear.

How long can they continue? Until the academic text they claim to be writing is ready for publication? Until the next group of antagonistic, apocalyptically inclined aural guerrillas come along to take their place? With the climactic "Perfect Teenage", such questions hardly seem relevant. Keely is willingly dragged into the crowd by the neck of his guitar; the drummer stomps across the stage, screaming into the mic, dumping his kit on the audience while some of them rise out of the throng to offer themselves as sacrifices. On the way out, a young girl passes me, brandishing Busch's Flying V. An encore hardly seemed necessary.