A photogenic 23-year-old Londoner with lips almost as luscious as Ian McCulloch's (and a couple of low-key singles under his belt) Tom Vek proves there are still places to take the post-punk revival post-Franz Ferdinand.

Island Records have just invested a substantial amount of money in Vek's potential stardom, perhaps hoping to atone for the ubiquity of perky Tory house-band Busted.

Half the fun is spotting the influences. Talking Heads loom large in Vek's declamatory vocal and kinetic ragdoll dancing, in the songs' dislocated white funk - albeit muddied somewhat by Vek's live band, in the blatant rip-off of Once in a Lifetime that is Green Lights. Mark E Smith echoes in Vek's tendency to bolt a nonchalant "ah" on the ends of words.

Lyrics repeatedly telegraph a sense of boundless possibility, nowhere more thrillingly than in indisputable ace in the pack, I Ain't Saying My Goodbyes - two fingers to the serious troubadours and minor-chord rock that clogged up the past 10 years in the wake of Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. "There is so much still to see," sings Vek. "All these young men obsessed with death/It's not my time yet." It's impossible not to feel galvanised as the chorus soars over ringing guitar and elastic bass. In the self-explanatory Green Lights he's facing "nothing but open roads". Hopefully they'll take him away from the moments of pastiche that mark him as a pup.

As with early sightings of Franz and Scissor Sisters, however, there is unmistakably the sense of the arrival of a marvellous new pop star in the classic mould, come to sweep away the last remnants of Simon Cowell's grim hegemony.