Quintessentially eccentric, like say Robert Smith partying with the Bonzo Dogs, Frommars plough their weirdness into every aspect of their art.

The new Cwmbran/ Newport band has just released their debut album -- 23 -- and embarked on a 23-date tour of the UK this week.

An album of 12 songs, it was recorded and made available in bits to download in 23 hours last month.

The official release is now in Diverse, Rockaway, and Spillers and is the best record produced in Newport for a while.

There is a darkness to the band but really this is just lace deep as there's a healthy, love of the strange-yet-rocking beneath.

Songs like Who Is David David? and Hit are Buzzcocks as with their raucous hooks and they are even similar to the Kinks in their story-telling prowess.

The band is clever with its madness and there's a definite sense of restrained and honed unhingedness throughout.

Piffle is a barely contained psycho-ballad which passes before you like you were running through a 19th Century freakshow carnival.

The hiccupping dog noise behind the bass throb is simply amazing.

The voice in the band is a key part, and probably the darkest, and in another band it could be mistaken for coming from a goth.

But in Frommars, it's much better like the shamanic lordings of a mad priest on a mountain.

On Angus Cope it veers from a cavernous babble to chest-beating shouting -- it's real rabble-rousing stuff.

The album veers on, sometimes blindly, but the hectic task the band set itself produced some spontaneous results such as Dysphoria, which kind of comes from nowhere and develops into a masterpiece.

Indeed, this is the key to the band -- the lack of revision is evident.

If they'd changed one bit of 23 they'd have lost the magic but as it stands this is unadulterated feeling and pure rock'n'roll.

Frommars' dark, hairy songs with a melodic edge and the band's passion for the eccentric will endear them to weirdoes the world over. And lord knows that I am one of them.

* For more information surf to www.frommars.tk or www.from-mars.co.uk. See the band live in Louisiana, Bristol (April 11 -- 01179 265978), Moles, Bath (April 21 -- 01225 404445), The Croft, Bristol (April 23 -- 0117 9874144), and Meze lounge, Newport (April 26 -- 07734 208010).