It is not usual to talk about a band's management in publicity material. Music, you might believe, is brought to us by the tooth fairy - not the machinations of a kind of mafia. But the biography of the Dead 60s, faux-indie label Deltasonic's most blatantly commercial proposition, divulges that they are managed by QPrime, a big-league US company that is also home to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. It picked up the band after their debut single, Riot Radio, was the third most-played record on college radio in 2005.

The band toured extensively in the States, and it has clearly paid off. Unfortunately, about the best thing you can say about the Dead 60s is that they convince entirely as a gang, and are aggressively competent as a live band. They have not, alas, stumbled on anything you could call a unique identity. Variously, they suggest Manic Street Preachers without eyeliner and library cards, an indie-rock UB40 and, occasionally, Spinal Tap gone new wave.

A forthcoming second album sees the band largely ditching the dub-lite soundscapes of their debut, replacing the Specials and the Clash with a super-melodic but safe and predictable pop-rock that probably imagines itself as radio-friendly. Songs such as Start a War are perfectly well-crafted and admirably succinct, but offer little more than simple, if well-meant, sloganeering. Riot Radio, on the other hand, develops into a dubby sprawl, replete with congas and cowbell. (Singer Matt McManamon should really log on to YouTube, where he'll discover Will Ferrell has had the definitive word on the cowbell in rock.) Bluff and blokey to the point of comedy, the Dead 60s seem to aspire to that rarefied, aesthetically deadened level of success at which it doesn't matter if anyone likes them.

· At Dingwalls, London, tonight. Box office: 08700 600 100.