At a time when artists and record labels chase trends in the hope of commercial success, there's something arresting about a band at odds with everything around them. Which brings us to Hot Club de Paris. If you were setting out to alienate a mainsteam rock audience, you could do worse than form a band whose touchstones include three-part folk harmonies, the twitchy, jazzy, Marxist hardcore punk of the Minutemen and the rococo guitar lines of math-rock, which, for anyone who missed it in the mid-90s, was a more challenging offshoot of post-rock, ideal for those who felt Labradford and Gastr del Sol were too rapaciously mainstream.

Tonight, the Liverpool trio's set begins, to the audience's audible surprise, with an a cappella number. "Hot Club de Paris," they harmonise lustily, "we fuck anything that moves." The next three songs pass by in as many minutes, sharp slivers of frantic drumming, ornate guitar and unpredictable, surprisingly sweet melodies. The pace takes its toll on the band - "I'm pooped," announces guitarist Matt Smith from beneath his baseball cap, "I've got a stitch" - and sporadically on the listener. Keeping track of the shifting time signatures and complicated riffing occasionally seems like hard work, but it's dashed off with such adrenaline and wit that more often it sounds quite dazzling: reckless ambition honed into bite-sized chunks.

Twenty years ago, Hot Club de Paris would have achieved a kind of fame through John Peel: it's impossible to hear single Sometimesitsbetternottostickbitsofeachotherineachotherforeachother without imagining a laconic voice announcing that it's No 26 in this year's festive 50. Today, there's nowhere Hot Club de Paris fit in, but they seem perfectly happy in the margins, abstruse and charming in equal measure.

· At Night and Day, Manchester, tonight. Box office: 0161-832 1111. Then touring.