"Remember your past but keep it living in the future", said the reggae veteran Burning Spear; the quote re-appears on the cover of Uprising, the new album by Poland's self-styled "hard-core folk" specialists, Warsaw Village Band. What's more, they manage to do just that.

Here is a young band who base their music on traditional Polish folk songs but have created that a fresh, unexpected and contemporary acoustic style that includes both edgy, attacking songs and at times startlingly experimental settings.

The band is built around three female singers and instrumentalists, and the show started with the elfin-like Maja Kleszcz alone on stage, singing and playing cello. She was then joined by a rousing violinist Sylwia Swiatkowska and a percussive dulcimer player, Magdalena Sobczak, and the trio launched into urgent, attacking and at times spine-chilling three-part harmony work. They in turn were backed by three male musicians, one playing the bodhran-like baraban drum, another looking like a busker with a frame drum, cymbal and triangle suspended in front of him, and the third a dreadlocked violinist. They were all dressed in designer rustic hippy gear, but there was nothing quaint about the music.

They constantly changed direction, from passages of drifting strings and dulcimer through to taut, bleak and sturdy songs like Woman In Hell or the upbeat, rhythmic In The Forest, which sounded suitably contemporary even without the techno and scratching effects that appear on the album version. Then there was a polka dance work-out (described as "not commercial polka but old school hard-core roots polka"), and even a burst of "Polish blues", with minimal violin and drums providing an insistent, slinky rhythmic backing for another good vocal work-out. There were, of course, echoes of old Polish folk songs, as when Swiatkowska demonstrated the traditional violin, the plock fidel, but even here her playing veered off into the unexpected and experimental.

At the end of their South Bank show they were greeted with a standing ovation. This is new European music that deserves a far wider audience.