I don't know when this album came out. I found it in a pile of promos that I mistakenly kicked under the bed, but it's one of the best things I've heard all year, criminally ignored.

Let's get this straight. Yes, French Kicks are from New York, they wear white belts, and they share a record company with The Walkmen and a scene with the You-Know-Who's, but they're not trendy, they don't have a "The" in their name, and more importantly, they don't suck. Long the runt of the NYC garage band litter, One Time Bells sees the band carving out their own niche. The usual influences are there (60's punk, the Velvets, Jonathan Fire*Eater, blah blah blah) but French Kicks are more angular, almost autistic in their intensity. Strangled guitars as rhythmic snarls, like a Television record on a locked groove, strive for space with electric pianos assaulted in tone-bursts like a surreal acidic version of Elton John (no, *really*) and the words skate over the top in long, disjointed, fractured phrases.

The first time you hear it, it sounds alien, almost discordant, but like looking at a Jackson Pollock painting, suddenly it clicks and becomes a gorgeous filigree of texture and repetition, sharp insistent drums the beat that holds it all together. One Time Bells is more reflective in tone than last year's mini-album Young Lawyer. It's an album for the wee hours of the morning after, rather than the energetic burst of getting ready to go out. It's the sound of taking the subway home at 5am - the takka-takka of the train-tracks, muffled squeals of metal on metal, the watchdaclosindaws tones echoing through deserted stations, as you sing softly to yourself.

But don't think there's not catchy, spiky pop tunes smuggled in there; the Wire-like rush of Crying Just For Show and the head-nodding tremolo art-punk of 1985 make a centrepiece round which the entire album spins. And Where We Went Off is the most gorgeous bell-like Christmas carol you'll never hear in church. It's not an obvious album, it's not one that reaches out of your stereo and grabs your ears like candy, but it's an album that will hang round the edges of your ears like a dream that you can't forget, and drag you back into its deceptively complicated melodic spell.