Make no mistake about it, Californian quintet Comets On Fire aren't like any other band you're likely to see this or any other year. Or in past, for that matter, unless you happen to have attended those free festivals of folklore, circa the late Sixties. Which therefore makes you eligible for that bus pass, a meals on wheels voucher and central heating allowance.

If their name suggests something exploding in petroleum and second-hand MC5 riffs from a disused back street garage, Comets' musical outlook is something different entirely. That's not to say that they aren't capable of the latter - one listen to their eponymous debut album would see to that, and even tonight's show, culled in its entirety from the band's mellower records (by their reckoning at least) Blue Cathedral and Avatar, has enough hair-raising moments of skyscraping beauty and monolithic pomp to keep both the blues enthusiasts and Sub Pop headbangin' heavy brigade smiling for a good hour.

In fact, if Woodstock were to return as a post-millennium free for all, the organisers could do a hundred times worse than ask Comets On Fire to be the resident house band for the weekend. Coming on like Lynyrd Skynyrd's proteges if they'd spent a decade trapped in a Tardis before being spewed out at the arse-end of punk rock, their all-encompassing, louder-than-bombs brain stew is a joy to behold, particularly during the grandiose perplexity of 'Holy Teeth' and sonic holocaust of 'Whiskey River'. Lead vocalist Ethan Miller's Santa Cruz twang proves eerily reminiscent of My Morning Jacket's Jim James on the delicate poise of 'The Swallow's Eye', delivered midset.

There's certainly something engaging about these Californians and their psychedelic, post-punk-riffed update on the blues; it's something which isn't lost on the audience, a good percentage of which is made up of members of Nottingham's local band scene, stretching back a quarter of a decade or more.

So the secret's out and about, and once word spreads to the man on the street, there's no doubting these comets will have already taken off into a backward-looking, forward-thinking world of their own. The question is, will you be ready to join them?

Photograph taken from the band's MySpace page, here.