When Will I Be Famous?

The Independent's guide to tomorrow's bands

Sludgefeast are great. A four-piece from the Deep South (well, Bournemouth), they simply refuse to pander to such essentially tedious concepts as taste and intelligence and competence, preferring to play lots of very short songs that all sound the same. Their debut "album", Rock'n'Roll, 16 tracks in 18 minutes, offers a taste, but live, their idiocy makes perfect sense. All sporting horrible wraparound shades of the type that everyone buys at their first rock festival, they are a blessed mess, somewhere between Monster Magnet with attention deficit disorder and the Eighties New York art-noise favourites Pussy Galore. The self-explanatory three-chorder "E-G-A" and "My God We Got Some Rockin'" are the best tunelets, and it's hard to get bored with a band who can play three songs while your pint of stout settles.

Sludgefeast are great. A four-piece from the Deep South (well, Bournemouth), they simply refuse to pander to such essentially tedious concepts as taste and intelligence and competence, preferring to play lots of very short songs that all sound the same. Their debut "album", Rock'n'Roll, 16 tracks in 18 minutes, offers a taste, but live, their idiocy makes perfect sense. All sporting horrible wraparound shades of the type that everyone buys at their first rock festival, they are a blessed mess, somewhere between Monster Magnet with attention deficit disorder and the Eighties New York art-noise favourites Pussy Galore. The self-explanatory three-chorder "E-G-A" and "My God We Got Some Rockin'" are the best tunelets, and it's hard to get bored with a band who can play three songs while your pint of stout settles.

The Clientele's recent album, Suburban Light, has been well received, its gentle Sixties dreaminess appealing if indistinct, and the band are building up a following on American college radio. But judging by this underwhelming display, they're unlikely to break into the public consciousness. The effective rhythm section thump through the beat of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" repeatedly, while the singer/guitarist Alasdair MacLean, dressed like Ardal O'Hanlon in one of his soft-lad roles, whines almost despairingly while picking out mildly jazz-tinged lines on a cheap guitar. The half-hearted rave-up at the end is quite the feeblest thing I've heard this year. Why would anyone choose to play such dull music?

The US quartet Wheatus are guaranteed to hit with their impending single "Teenage Dirtbag". They've been compared to the forgotten one-hit wonders Weezer, but that's unfair - on Weezer. They're much nearer to the infernal Spin Doctors. And they play a rocked-up Erasure cover. But there's something disturbingly respectable about these Long Island dorks: even when a gaggle of rock chicks climb up on stage, they can't be persuaded into anything more interesting than pogoing and smirking. Pathetic - the Bloodhound Gang would have had them comparing nipple-rings faster than you can say "juvenile". Wheatus will, of course, be massive for a year or so, before being consigned for ever to the "Where are they now?" file.