A week before this much-loved tiny venue closes its doors, tonight's bill teems with keen, ruddy-cheeked youths, shining with celebratory spirit. Kentucky-born New Yorker Dawn Landes is up first with her bright twangy guitar, playing sweet country-flavoured songs seasoned with confidence and robustness - qualities that sadly undercut the genre's soft vulnerabilities. Joined two songs in by Turner Cody and the Sargasso Trio, Landes' music only takes off when her band play with loops and qualities of tone, but we never reach the exuberant whirlwind she achieves on record - the accordion, optigon (an organ-like instrument) and glockenspiel she usually turns to remain at home. At best, she purveys vivid girl-next-door indie pop in the spirit of Frente and Cat Power, but at its leanest, her music trudges with all the vim of a sluggish Sheryl Crow.

The Young Republic follow with the earnestness and buoyancy you would expect from a bunch of sharp, classically trained, music college students. There are eight of them, including a hip-shimmying flautist, two fiddlers, a polka-dot-dressed, stripy-socked keyboardist, and the finest-hatted rhythm section to ever bounce out of Boston. The storm of ideas and sounds spins around singer Julian Saporiti, an apparition of Paul McCartney in early 1963, complete with waistcoat, tie and mop top. His voice fizzes with Jonathan Richman's wryness and Jack White's bite, adding extra dazzle to songs that flit playfully between 1960s Phil Spector-style sparkle, power pop, and jaunty country. Everything buzzes by breezily, until an extraordinary cover of Bob Dylan's Isis raises the bar even further. To cover a song that's so intrinsically Dylan's is a sign of their confidence; to make it wild, mad and entirely their own, is proof of their incredible potential. Catch them while you can.

· The Young Republic play The Knights, Middlesbrough (01642 228330) and Dawn Landes plays The Social, Nottingham (08713 100 000) tonight. Then touring.