Firstly a small word of congratulations to two American bands who are still rock and roll enough to get on a plane and tour the UK; it really does mark out the men from the boys. Then again, take one look at San Francisco trio The Fucking Champs in all their lank, greasy, slack-jawed Deliverance-like glory and you wonder if they even know there’s a war on.

In their world, you see, it’s still 1980. So the first of their handful of instrumental opuses tonight sounds like a collection of every guitar solo from Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’ album. Their second track, ‘Never Enough Neck, Pts I & II’, meanwhile does the same for Thin Lizzy’s ‘Live and Dangerous’. They’re so unselfconsciously naff that we think we might love them, but when they start playing a metal version of Bach’s ‘Air on a G-String’ we realise that they are in fact Bill and Ted’s Wild Stallions. Lord preserve us.

It’s still 1980 in Trans Am’s world too to an extent. Hailing from Washington DC, they’re a frighteningly prolific three-piece featuring a singing drummer called Sebastian Thompson and two refugees from Battlestar Gallactica on keyboards and occasional guitar and bass. Their first song, ‘I Want It All’ sounds exactly like Gary Numan, only sung by a primitive children’s robot toy. Their second song sounds like Rush or, you have to believe us, Styx covering Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. And it sounds awesome. Trans Am are about excess - theirs is music free from irony; retro-futurism played by master musicians who excel at being clever and complex but never sink to indulgence - other than when indulgence is deemed absolutely necessary. Songs - often more akin to modern classical pieces - are hammered out with incredible force but also equal subtlety. There are huge slabs of pulsing bass synth, junkyard drum solos and what sound like vast swarms of cyborg wasps escaping from the unassuming banks of synthesizers; there are occasionally lulls in the set when you want to shout “get on with it” but you soon realise they’re there so that when Trans Am do get on with it, it sounds twice as magnificent.

They finish with the appropriately titled ‘City In Flames’, the vicious electro-hardcore noise taking vicious twists and turns, hurtling along over a raw, brutal Big Black-style bassline before everything implodes, the bass player ripping every taut string from his instrument with his bloodied hands. And still they return for an encore. Post rock? Bollocks, this is pure, unrefined rock. Played with this kind of skill and vehemence, nothing in the world sounds sweeter.

Dale Kattack