They’re a bit of a strange mix, this lot. There’s guitarist Mikey, easygoing and funny, bassist (and singer-songwriter in his own right) Rob, all testosterone and belly-laughs, and Sarah, a mass of contradiction, switching from tough-as-nails to girly and giggly in the same sentence, and who sings like a chorister but drums like six blokes. Not the most obvious choice of bandmates, especially given that they’d never met each other at the start.

“We got together out of a good old fashioned want and need to play music I guess, and we stayed together after writing six or seven songs in a couple of weeks for our first ever gig, only to realise that they weren’t shit – two or three of them we still play today”, says Mikey.

Which, for me anyway, is as good an explanation as any as to why the songs don’t neatly fit into the usual boxes. Sure, most are a bit fast, most are pretty poppy, and there’s bagfuls of energy and joy to spare, but the Art School Wanker-ometer influence is kept fairly low, and there’s a variety in there that is sometimes regretably absent when groups of friends form bands together.

“We sound like we do because it’s just what happens when we get together”, says Sarah, “it’s not really planned, and we don’t have an agenda like ‘alright guys, we want to channel 1950s Hawaii in this song’. I mean, of course our music is layered by our influences but they’re not overtly out there. We all want our songs to be energetic and fun. Sometimes they’re more dramatic, some of them sound more punk and a couple are light-hearted pieces of danceability.”

Rob agrees: “I listen to loads of different musicians and bands, but you probably can’t hear much of their influence in our music. The first artist that really opened my eyes beyond acoustic singer-songwriter stuff was The Postal Service, and we couldn’t sound more different to them. I think we do a pretty good job of sounding quite different to all our individual influences – which is just how I like it.”

“I think we started off trying to write the songs we wanted to hear on a night out”, says Mikey, “and from there we’ve probably developed into a little bit of evening and early-morning listening too. I know we get given the ‘pop’ tag a lot,which is cool, but a lot of the stuff we play isn’t particularly upbeat to me.”

Starting off by writing the soundtrack to a night out is – to me – a knockout statement of intent, but it’s the vaguely bemused surprise at the pop tag that’s interesting. For a band that – live, anyway – postively foam at the mouth with melody and hooks and rhythm, it’s odd that they don’t set out to write ‘pop’ songs, they just turn out that way – given they don’t plan to sound the way they do, it must come from somewhere internal, and personal. For example, Mikey says that “the city’s probably the biggest influence” on the songs, Sarah talks about being surrounded by music growing up and being obsessed with Abba while her friends were into Take That, and Rob claims that any song they write “has to be something that I want to listen to, and something that I enjoy playing. While the second part sounds massively selfish, it’s a healthy kind of selfishness – when you enjoy playing something, you get more enthusiastic about it”.

This isn’t – clearly – a band trying to wite something fashionable, this is a band putting together songs that sound and feel like they do themselves. That said, Rob’s also pretty clear about why he got into music in the first place, cheerfully admitting that “when I was growing up, I played a lot of music, and I did a lot of computer programming. In my late teens, I realised that one of these two activities would help in my pursuit of the fairer sex. It wasn’t programming.”

It’s not easy though, this music lark, and since you, dear reader, are struggling through all this via a modem of some kind, a lot of that is your fault, according to most music indutry types. Come On Gang!, though, mostly love the fact that the internet has changed the way bands work for ever.

“It’s certainly different these days, and I think there are good and bad elements to it. For example, there’s a lot more music available out there to find at the click of a few buttons – music you don’t have to trek through record shop dust to get to, or that’s half recorded in terrible quality off the radio. It’s wonderfully convenient and it zaps a lot of colour into life. But it might mean that record shop dust might be out of your life forever, and there’s no fragrance quite the same as clapped-out old vinyl. We love the increased interaction of people with the band, though, and I think Rob’s into technology or something, so he’s happy.”

“I love the idea that a band can write a song, record it, then have people listen to it within 24 hours,” agrees Rob. “And there’s still a lot of scope for things to move more in that direction. People make a lot of noise about the death of the music industry, but that’s nonsense, it’s just changing – in terms of overall profit, the music industry is much healthier than most! As a band, you have to choose how you want to deal with the changes: you can complain about it, or you can see all the new opportunities and embrace them. The level of fan interaction these days is incredible, and I think it’s great for bands and fans alike. Change is good.”

Mikey’s a bit more pragmatic though – “I really think from a musician or band’s perspective, nothing should’ve changed too much, as they’ve always had to work hard. Every industry changes every five years, so it’s counterproductive to whine about the music industry shifting gear so much. I’m quite a purist really, all I care about is putting on good shows, writing good songs and making good albums, and rest of the stuff is the grease to make that wheel turn. Back in the day bands had to go round venues trying to play the managers their demo tapes, so in many ways it’s far easier these days. People can access your music however they want, but it’s worth bearing in mind that someone could download and love your entire back catalogue, but unless they support the band in some way, they’re not a fan; they’re just a listener.”

I suggest their lack of oafish arrogance, an absence of indier-than-thou snobbery and general all-round cheeriness springs from coming up in Edinburgh instead of an arguably tougher music landscape such as Glasgow, Manchester or London.

“I’ve not lived in another city while in a band, so I don’t really know about others, plus it’s a bit of a cliche here I know, but it’s true”, says Sarah, “there’s a real community spirit in Edinburgh…”

“…if not a common musical thread”, adds Mikey.

“I was listening to Huw Stephens the other night”, continues Rob, warming to the theme, “and he told a story about meeting some band from Brooklyn and saying how with all the Brooklyn bands that were around at the time, he’d imagined Brooklyn as one endless show, with bands on every corner all high-fiving each other as they walked around the neghbourhood. The band replied that they hardly knew any other bands in Brooklyn, and neither did many of the others, that Brooklyn wasn’t really a scene of itself, but just a pretty cool place that a lot of bands lived in. Edinburgh’s a lot more like that though, most bands know each other and are actually friends.”

“It’s easy to get noticed quickly in Edinburgh”, agrees Mikey, “but you’ve got to work really hard all the time – because there are fewer bands, you can’t just drop in and out, which you can do to a certain extent in larger cities since there are so many other bands to fill in the gaps. There are less places to hide here, which is a good thing”.

I finally have to leave at this point, but again I notice that I’m most often struck by just how likeable they are, musically and personally. If they were the new kids in school, you’d instantly be friends with them; if they were your aunt, they’d be the cool one who slipped you cigarettes and lent you her driving license; if they were your younger brother, you’d be gutted because all your friends fancied them.

The songs may well be smashed together like a chaotic night on the tiles, they may not be the coolest gang in town, and they may well not be entirely clear on what is going on a lot of the time, but as Sarah says to anyone who hates them for any of these reasons,  “if you’re predisposed to hate, then that’s your business. Personally I think hating stuff takes up too much energy. No one is allowed to hate sequins, though”.

Which is just about right – the haters, the music snobs and the glory-hunters can stand silently at the back of a different gig, look for faults and failings, write it all down on the fucking internet, and generally have less fun. Meanwhile, we’ll all go out dancing, and Come On Gang! will be up on stage instead – not the brightest internet stars in Edinburgh, and not the brashest personalities, but a dazzling pinprick of light on the noisy fabric of the city, a glittering sequin on Edinburgh’s party frock.

Come On Gang! are having a single launch in Edinburgh this Friday 10th September at The Caves in celebration of their new release ‘Fortune Favours The Brave’. FOUND and Jesus H Foxx are playing too, which makes it just about the perfect line-up for me. They’ll then head off on the rest of their tour around various parts of the UK, the dates for which are on their myspace.

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.

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.