The Vines Highly Evolved (Heavenly) ****

In September, representatives of the British music industry will prise themselves from Soho's drinking clubs and haul their expense accounts up the M1 for Manchester's In The City convention. This year, the event's tone is sombre. "The theme just has to be 'The State of the Nation'," sighs the official blurb. "Are we an industry in crisis? 'It's only rock'n'roll,' but it is so much to the hearts and to the economy of the UK and its friends."

You don't need to get the tarot cards out to predict what most of the debates are going to comprise: a lot of men wearing Evisu jeans, moaning about nu metal, Gareth Gates and the Stereophonics in the hand-wringing, why-oh-why tones of a Daily Mail columnist who has discovered a clan of asylum seekers camped out in their gazebo. "What is wrong with young people today?" they will cry. If they're not listening to imported rap-metal by Limp Bizkit, they're plumping for manufactured pop or plodding pub rock so determinedly tedious that even Americans won't buy it. The whole nation is cloth-eared, woe is us, etc.

You have to concede their point: nothing anybody does or says seems to affect British musical tastes any more. Over the past 18 months, a succession of brash, sparky new artists - the Strokes, the White Stripes, Andrew WK, Fischerspooner - have been hyped, but the public are not really biting. The Strokes have had two top 20 hits and a platinum album, but 2002's big new success stories are the Pop Idol winners and Canadians Nickleback, whose debut, Silver Side Up, combines metal and lumbering trad-rock to numbing effect and is currently the year's biggest-selling album.

The problem may be that the bands music journalists have alighted on are too, well, music journalisty for stadium-packing success. To get the point, you either need a detailed knowledge of rock's recherché past (the Strokes, the White Stripes) or a keenly developed sense of musical irony (Andrew WK, Fischerspooner). As the top of the album charts confirm, what people really want is something more straightforward.

Hence the excitement surrounding Sydney quartet the Vines. Their sound is undeniably powerful, derived in equal measure from the Beatles and Nirvana. You don't need a degree in rock history or a permanently arched eyebrow to enjoy them, but nor are they as wilfully dreary as the Stereophonics or Starsailor. And it's not "just about the music": their story comes laced with intriguing tales of Gallagher-esque fisticuffs and mental illness. Original drummer Dave Olliffe, a manic depressive, was replaced after suffering a breakdown, while lead singer Craig Nicholls turns up at interviews with cut arms and is gaining a reputation for self-destruction. One breathless review claimed Nicholls spent the Vines' debut UK gig singing with his eyes rolled back in his head. If you think you can hear something weird in the background while their debut album plays, it's the sound of music press features editors exploding with delight.

Bearing in mind the state of turmoil in which it was apparently created, Highly Evolved is a remarkably confident record. Like Oasis's debut Definitely Maybe, it essentially offers two kinds of song - raw-throated rock stomp and swaying ballad - but pulls off both with enviable panache. The title track and Outtathaway! are compact and ferocious, powered along by Nicholls's purging scream. The melodically luscious Autumn Shade and Mary Jane, meanwhile, serve up majestic harmonies, descending piano figures and lazily strummed acoustic guitars. Unlike Oasis's debut, however, Highly Evolved offers hints of an imagination not bound by the limitations of its record collection. Factory, a more polished version of the Vines' first single, is pleasingly difficult to pin down, arriving as it does on a peculiar, loping ska beat. It shouldn't really work, but its breeziness is irresistible.

This isn't music that invites close analysis. The pouting lyrics offer bratty teen angst, nothing dark enough to frighten the horses. "She never loved me, why should anyone?" snaps Get Free, before refusing to tidy its room, slamming the door and shouting that it didn't ask to be born. People seem keen to compare Nicholls to Kurt Cobain; thankfully, he's closer to the man who yelped angrily about haircuts and school on Nirvana's debut Bleach than the self-baiting suicidal man on swansong In Utero.

Nevertheless, there is a sense of fragile urgency about the Vines. They sound like they poured everything into Highly Evolved in the belief that they may implode before making another album. On the evidence of this debut, however, their immediate future at least seems assured. Uniquely for a rock album in 2002, Highly Evolved not only sounds like a critically acclaimed album, but also an undeniable hit.