It’s becoming weird, reviewing Come On Gang! shows. I stumbled across them by total accident a while back, and since I really, really liked them back then, I think I might now be getting a bit snow-blind and maternal when it comes to trying to be objective and all that guff. Essentially, I’m worried I might have completely crossed the line between “Hey, here’s a band I like, and here are the reasons why” over into “I’m a total slavering fanboy and they can do no wrong anymore”. That said, I’d been in an absolutely towering fucking temper all day long ahead of this gig, with less tolerance than normal for dumbness, inconvenience or, in particular, people not living up to expectations. So, if something were to cheer me up today, there’s probably an awful lot good about it – and by the time I get back from the Come On Gang! show at Sneaky Pete’s I’m grinning like a bit of an idiot.

It’s been some time since I saw them last, a good six months, and I’m pretty sure I bitched and whined like a child about a lack of new material in the set back then. This, as was grimly inevitable, comes back to bite me tonight, as they play nine songs, five of which are completely new to me, and only one of which I remember of old with any clarity. The good news though, is that they are almost uniformly immediate and energising, just like the earlier songs that got me twitching about them in the first place.

The even better news is that they’re not just the same tunes idly rehashed a year later, they’re actually better songs. While I still adore “Start The Sound”‘s artrock-in-a-stadium bigness, or I still can’t help the nervous shoulder twitch that’s brought on by “Wheels” (and I’m a bit gutted that neither get played tonight) I’m pretty chuffed to see them getting on with things, developing and growing and all that.

In particular tonight, the boys in the band seem to be much more than “just” the two other boys in a band with singer Sarah. Since she sings like she should be on Opera Star, the boys often almost seemed out of place – an angular rock counterpoint to Sarah’s choral trilling, but somehow still a bit separate. But that’s with hindsight – I’ve no idea what’s gone on over the last few months, but tonight Mikey (guitars) and Rob (bass) seem much more integral, and Sarah herself seems less alien to them.

Openers “Red Thread” and “Santa Maria” have been on the setlist before and tonight seem to be the comfortable openers, but it’s three tracks in when the eyes get truly widened, with new one “Need To Run”. For the first time I can remember, there’s two vocals going on, with Rob and Sarah sharing mic duties, and it’s a quantum leap for them, all call-and-answer and blood-quickening harmonies. To be fair, I’ve long been a sucker for the whole boy-girl vocal thing, but the contrast of the vocal styles, coupled with the usual daft energy and with a whole layer of top pop skills spread liberally over all of it makes it – for me – the highlight of the whole night. Usually it takes bands made up of six or seven folk to make a noise like this, and they’ve done it with three, and it’s moments like this which give fair warning about what they’re capable of. Making the same joyful racket as Los Campesinos! with half the band members is quite an achievement – by my maths, that makes them twice as talented, and holy hell, that should worry all of us. Although not as worried as you should be by Sarah’s clear penchant for the fucking cowbell, an instrument I personally think should be punishable by death, along with the bongo and the digeri-bastard-d0. But that’s just me.

Elsewhere tonight on the new tune front though, we get “This Familiar Road” which is almost George Formby in its clean-guitared jauntiness, and the fairly monumental “Fan The Flame”, again featuring some just-right boy shouting action, as well as “Awake” (not “The Rake” as I cloth-earedly first thought), where they get a little bit darker, before bursting into a preposterously huge chorus.

“Fortune Favours The Brave” pops up to reassure the veterans among us, but that’s it in terms of comfort, as yet another new one “In The City” ends it all, a suitably high-speed romp – as guitarist Mikey later puts it to me, “really just an exercise in how many hooks I could get in one song” – which puts a sweaty and cheerful full-stop to a show that was just as much a statement of intent as a demonstration of ability.

Either they’ve been eating their spinach, or paying attention in lessons or something, but tonight they’re almost a whole new band, recently out of a cocoon, with new muscles and big fuck-off wings and teeth. They say there’s the possibility that a lot of tonight’s new stuff might not end up on the album due later this year, and while I will be distraught if I don’t ever get a recorded version of “Need To Run”, the possibility that there’s even better stuff out there than tonight’s set makes me slightly weak at the knees. Plus, the prospect of them recording with ex-Delgados drummer and Phantom-Band-producer Paul Savage seems like a match made in whatever heaven is usually inhabited by intelligent, euphoric pop monsters.

I went along tonight with the nagging doubt that my critical faculties might not be firing on all cylinders, that I might be blinded to the fact that they’re another indie artrock band that are simply there to fill a hole until the next Franz Ferdinand arrive. I left knowing differently – yes, I’m a slavering fanboy; but also, yes – I’m absolutely fucking right to be.

Broken Records, meanwhile, clearly have other ideas. In fact, after tonight, I think I’ve finally realised why my parents told me Santa didn’t exist. It’s because at Christmas, it’s actually this lot who fire up the reindeer and deliver all the seasonal pleasure you could ever want, even if you’ve been in a really, really fucking bad mood all year long.

In their bag of goodies tonight, at the top of the stocking, next to the satsuma, is Withered Hand. Edinburgh’s cuddliest band by some margin, Dan Wilson’s slightly pie-eyed band of troubadours – onstage drink-droppingly early – are on the finest of fettles. Neil Pennycook’s backing vocal (“he doesn’t even need a microphone”, laughs Wilson), provides some considerable welly as backstop to Dan’s shyly endearing melodies, and while the room fills up, the atmosphere in the room becomes gradually more and more like a real party, as people smile and chatter and stamp off the cold outside. It closes up with – of all things – a brand new Withered Hand Christmas song (“I wrote it specially”, says Dan), called ‘A Wonderful Lie’. Despite the near-uniform but good-natured groans at the title, we get treated to the usual Wilson insight,  disguised as naivety – the line “you’re breaking my hand when you shake it / do you think that it makes you more of a man?” in particular raises a wry smile. As Dan closes the set on the final chorus line of “Didn’t this used to be a holy day? / Put your head in my lap it’s a wonderful lie“, the room’s starting to get chattier. The party has started.

It gets another shot in the arm from the very, very wonderful Jesus H Foxx. Despite being a man down – reduced to just the two drummers, the two guitarists and the six members – and despite projecting an image of being a band that play the same songs at the same speed in the same room purely by accident, they are just getting better and better. ‘Oh Messy Life’ is as glorious as ever, but ‘I Make A Plan, She Makes A Plan’ is light years away from where it was back in January – still the same glorious nonsense, but just the smallest bit of added structure is the difference between (and here comes the obligatory Pavement reference) Wowee Zowee and Stereo. It’s loveable chaos, but with added pop, Jim. They also drop in a new one towards the end, and as with so many songs of theirs (like, for example, the lost and lamented Gorky’s) manage to pull off the difficult trick of being not just one but two amazing bands in one, all at the same time, in the space of one song. How they do this I do not know, but it’s quite something to see when it works.

Finally though, just as the party’s getting heaving, as parents and families of the bands are mixing freely with drunken locals, Broken Records arrive. No intro, just a blast of thunderous violin and we’re off to the races with ‘Nearly Home’. They rattle through a set of hometown-friendly tracks, with “If Elert Lovberg…” almost raising the roof. There was a new one in here too – zing, hat-trick – a martial, insistent little number, that will forever be overshadowed in the minds of everyone present by the completely bonkers version of ‘Fairytale Of New York’, featuring a visibly delighted Tallah from Jesus H Foxx in the Kirsty MacColl role. It was daftly under-rehearsed and if we hadn’t all been so drunk and comfortable and among friends, it would no doubt have been the biggest disaster in all of musical history. It was fucking magic though, and even this cold heart found it had some cockles still capable of warmth.

So in this case, the party that was exactly that, with three of Edinburgh’s finest sons, daughters and adopted children all making merry, and all inviting us to join in. Top that, Santa.

Don’t get me wrong, I bloody LOVE Coxon, always have. Quiet, mischievous, with the very devil in his guitar hand, it should be impossible to dislike a man who comes across as shy and awkward but is also capable of smashing out inventive, credible arty pop whenever the mood takes him. Last time he came through Edinburgh, I was at the Liquid Rooms interviewing him for The Skinny, and he was as nice as always, as thoughtful and hospitable as always, and on stage he blew the damn bricks off the walls. That Queen’s Hall show last week should – by rights – have been a triumph of Biblical proportions. But, for me anyway, I felt rotten and cheated and annoyed.

A large chunk of the problem was the fact that he alternated between songs with electric guitars in them and ones with acoustics. Nice idea, and it was a blast to see Robyn Hitchcock wigging out on the same stage during the noisier bits, but it meant the show never really got anywhere. It felt like being a cart horse – just when you start to get a bit of a giddyup on, you get forcibly reined back in.

On top of that, Coxon himself decided to sit down to play his guitar on the acoustic numbers. The problem with this was just pure physics – Coxon’s not the tallest lad in the world, and the Queen’s Hall stage isn’t exactly neck-craning in its stature, with the upshot being that despite me being the other side of six feet tall, I could only just see the top of his mop during half the songs. Anyone shorter than me would presumably have seen even less. That really shit photo up there on the left was taken from well above my head, standing at the back, on a step. And Coxon (the out of focus blur on the left!) was standing up, if that gives you an idea.

I know, I know, I’ve already come across all moany and whiny and stupid, but it all comes from the same source – I could probably have lived with any of this if I’d paid a tenner for the ticket. But at a thumping eighteen pounds fifty, it would have been nice to see a bit of a show, I reckon. Instead, I got what felt like a total vanity project, thrown together on a whim, which felt disjointed and odd and which finally descended into some godawful noodling towards the end.

So – aside from feeling a bit disappointed with someone who I generally and genuinely adore, there’s probably a serioous point in there somewhere. Do we deserve a show with the price of admission? Is it enough to just be in the presence of the music? I don’t think so – given the times we live in, all artists should be showing us how they deserve our hard-earned, and given the scope his other day job allows him, Coxon had an opportunity to really deliver something memorable, instead of a night that turned into something a little bit, well, meh.

Now I do the maths, given that I only got the audio for half the set, I reckon that means Coxon owes me – personally – £4.63. Tell you what though Graham, since everyone’s nicking your music and we gave you food poisoning last time you were up, I’ll settle for a return to the usual blistering live form instead. Deal?

Bit of an odd one this. Turns out this isn’t a gig at all, but one big advert for Belvedere Vodka. I’m a big fan of anything that’s the business end of a cocktail, but seriously, anyone that says that one vodka is radically different from another once it’s drowned in fruit juice is lying through their arse and should be avoided at all costs. Vodka is a clolse cousin of the stuff my car runs on and that’s an end of it.

Tonight though, there’s bucketloads of it swilling around for free, so instead of your average Edinburgh crowd for a popular unsigned band, it’s like the office party. Lots of frocks, lots of chatting up, and LOTS of drunk women. And you know what – it was probably the most fun crowd I’ve ever seen while watching a ‘credible’ band. Hipsters take note – fucking cheer up, would you, life’s just better that way.

Anyway, there are DJ sets either side of Come On Gang, which I pay precisely no notice of, partly because I’m too busy snarfing free vodka, and partly because I wouldn’t know a good DJ set if it came up and smashed my face in. So, back to the indie pop, I’m a bit more sure-footed there.

It’s been a while since I last saw Come On Gang back at the start of the year – since then, they’ve been to SXSW, played a bundle of decent support slots, and got a new cheerful and mohican-ed bassist called Rob. Tonight’s eight-song set doesn’t go anywhere new song-wise, with new-ish ones Red Fred and Santa Maria being the only two tracks not off the setlist from last year, but they seem to be playing with bagfuls more confidence. It might have just been the soundman’s skills but it sounds like they’ve grown new muscles, and are making it look easier and easier as time goes on.

Opener Wheels is still as instantly engaging as the first time I heard it, tonight played slightly slower than normal, and sounding all the more confident for it. The riff-tabulous Both Ends Burning and Coffee Shop pick up the pace again, with Sarah’s vocal pouring it’s usual honey all over the sharp-tailored guitar racket. I skip the quieter Wood For The Trees on the basis that it’s just not that pop, but come back for the two newer ones.

Santa Maria really shows off how sleek they’re getting – heavyweight Yeah Yeah Yeah guitar hooks over a pounding and relentless backdrop, with even Sarah’s choral antics sounding like it’s been knocking back the strong continentals and has decided IT WANTS TO FIGHT YOU NOW. It’s a bloody nose over a cup of tea, and is fast becoming the soundtrack in my head to the best fight ever. Soon-to-be the new single Red Fred meanwhile, gets back to a more UK-sounding guitar pop racket but is again less wide-eyed than earlier stuff, while staying way jumpy and way fun, reminding me strangely of The Housemartins. It’s a little gem, and will be a cracker when it comes out of the studio. Best of all, it’s got a cowbell in it – a fucking cowbell! It takes stones the size of Volkswagens to put a cowbell in any song because let’s face it, they sound shit most of the time.

Finishing off with Start The Sound – one of my all-time favourite songs, which still manages to sound like it could blow the bricks off a stadium, without ever acting like it’s better than you – and a reprise-laden Spinning Room – let’s play the chorus again, just for fun, wheee! – it all seems to be coming together the way its supposed to.

Appropriately enough, Sarah mentions – to huge drunken whoops, it was that kind of crowd – that she graduated earlier in the day. Come On Gang have also come of age now, past the bit where we love them like puppies, at that stage where we want them to start to venture out and hunt for themselves. They’ve got the songs in the cupboard, no doubt, and they’re still brimming with enough vim and spunk and snot and sugar and energy for six whole bands on stage – the next year will see whether they’ve got enough of the right stuff to take them further than hometown hero status.