Quotes of the Day

It's hard to pigeonhole Glasvegas. While Britain's music scene is currently awash with spattered Day-Glo clothing and hipster aloofness, the band of the moment dress in black and embrace their emotions with astonishing honesty. But what's this cream-colored cocktail in the hand of lead singer James Allan as he sits — black shoes, black Ray-Bans, black vertical hair — in the windowless bar of a posh London hotel? "Hey, don't box me!" says Allan, with a smile as unexpected as the banana breeze he's sipping.

Allan and his band are making a habit of defying preconceptions. While the soundtrack to 2008 is all jangling indie guitars and retro '80s bleeping, the Scottish band's much heralded debut album, released on Sept. 8, boasts a mile-high Phil Spector-style "wall of sound" built — as it was by fellow Glaswegians the Jesus and Mary Chain — with brooding, layered guitars and pounding rhythms. Those expansive, girl-group arrangements are the epic backdrops to Glasvegas' brave and brutal lyrics. "Where Spector came from I guess is quite a good place to go if you want to land some punches and deliver something that's furious," says Allan. "We really didn't want to mess about."

In tackling gang fights, imprisonment and infidelity, Allan's lyrics are more akin to Johnny Cash than the Klaxons. Current single Daddy's Gone is a stark rebuke from son to absentee father: "I won't be the lonely one/ Sitting on my own and sad/ A 50-year-old reminiscing what I had." The schoolyard taunt is made all the more poignant by harmonies soaring free from a Ronettes-style melody.

That potent combination caught the attention of music mogul Alan McGee (who signed Primal Scream and Oasis, among others, to his former label) when he saw Glasvegas playing third on the bill at Glasgow's tiny King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in 2006. "The night was more exciting to me than when I saw and signed Oasis at the same venue," McGee wrote on his blog for the Guardian. Lisa Marie Presley was inspired to seek out the band in Scotland last year after hearing their demo online. By this June, influential British music magazine the NME had put them on the cover and declared them THE BEST NEW BAND IN BRITAIN.

It's a long way from the band's roots in the hard-scrabble streets of Glasgow's East End. Allan, his cousin Rab (guitar), Paul Donoghue (bass) and Caroline McKay (drums) hail from Dalmarnock, a gritty neighborhood where male life expectancy is just 58 years, almost two decades below the British average. The hardest gig, Allan says, was his first, in front of his mother. "Picking up a guitar in the first place was braver than any of the songs that I wrote," says Allan, a semiprofessional footballer until the band took off. "When you're a kid, drinking, playing football or kissing girls are never going to be frowned upon. But when you start to let your guard down and express yourself, then there's room for people to take the piss."

Nobody can accuse the band of cowardice. The opening song on the album, Flowers and Football Tops, is inspired by the racist 2004 murder of a 15-year-old, while Go Square Go captures the pounding, fearful heart of a school fight — all delivered with Allan's uncompromising accent that makes the Proclaimers' broad Edinburgh brogue sound like plummy royalty.

What could be dismissed as just too grim is checked by the band's obvious sense of humanity. The hope-filled Geraldine at first seems like the recounting of good deeds by some spiritual guardian, until the chorus reveals, "I'll be the angel on your shoulder/ My name is Geraldine, I'm your social worker." Think R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts the first time you heard it.

Glasvegas even tackle one of those subjects you're meant never to bring up in polite company: religion. The band divides along the religious lines of Glasgow's state schools. "I was at a Catholic school, he was at a Protestant school," James says, nodding to his cousin Rab, who has joined him in the bar. "Our mums are twins," adds Rab, without clarifying further. Allan's feelings about this division inform the album's haunting, hymn-like final track Ice Cream Van, a paean to a better place, a world free of sectarianism and hate. It's hard to imagine any other trendy indie band credited with nailing the zeitgeist writing something as bold as a message. But Glasvegas leave us with this one: "Bring back the glory days/ Active citizenship and pure community/ Freedom of faith." I'll drink a banana breeze to that.

• HUGH PORTER
• Riding the odds, Scottish band Glasvegas' debut turns tough tales of real life into soaring anthems