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.