Who's a clever boy?

Psychogeography. Am I missing something, or isn't it a load of rubbish? I don't mean the enjoyable newspaper column by Will Self, but the nebulous intellectual in-group whose world view - and I'm willing to be persuaded that I'm wrong - seems to boil down to the blindingly obvious conviction that architecture and environment can affect human behaviour. Let's invent our own psychogeogra-phy-style pseudoscience, shall we? The study of the meaning of band T-shirt stalls. We'll call it Merchandistics. Maxmo Park's concession is selling a bright red T-shirt with the words "Ignorance Isn't Bliss" (a current song lyric) in white block capitals, and as a mission statement for the band, it'll do nicely.

Now, if psychogeography would have us view the human as a passive and malleable subject of his/her surroundings, Maxmo Park's Paul Smith takes completely the opposite view: your surroundings are the backdrop to your own self-created drama, in which you are the agent. So where most people might see a typically homogenous 21st-century city, Smith can see the ghosts in the concrete, the magic among the plate glass. Indeed, the old-fashioned Maxmo Y-front underpants on sale are a telltale clue that Smith understands the potency of the echoes of the past.

Now, if speaking about a rock band in these terms seems unwarranted and pretentious, it's vindicated the moment I walk into the UEA hall to hear Smith raging "In the gaps between words are the things that intrigue me". Granted, we are going through a period of extended down-dumbing in which, with bands of the View/Twang/Kooks level, gaps between words are what happens when they're trying to remember what words are. But that's no excuse for not recognising the superior article when it's before our eyes.

To see a band create a fusion of the intellectual and the physical is a rare and precious thing. I've seen it in The Smiths in full flight, and I see it in Maxmo Park tonight. His comb-over ditched in favour of a bowler hat, jerking and shuddering like an epileptic Chaplin, fists clenched and screaming "Come on!", the - ahem - "28 year old" is proof that bookishness and vitality are not mutually exclusive; indeed they can enhance one another (living is diminished unless you have the emotional vocabulary to describe it, and literacy isn't worth much unless you get your hands dirty). Maxmo Park are not Softy Walters. But when Smith sings "we spent the night unpacking books from boxes", it occurs to me that most indie singers' personal libraries would struggle to fill one Top Man carrier bag.

Am I focusing on Maxmo's leader too much? Is this the Paul Smith show? Maybe, according to his slight faux-pas - he describes the superb second album Our Earthly Pleasures as "my new record". In any case, his band have upped their game from the nouveau-Pulpisms of A Certain Trigger: the snares snap like mantraps, the treble strings scour like wire wool. But it's the words that set them apart. Words like "porcelain" and "Parisian" (and that's just the Ps, in just one song) bring vivid colour to his tales of urban romances and missed opportunities, without being overly showy. Well, perhaps "you react to my riposte" is a bit much.

Leaving nothing to chance, Smith has an enjoyable line in pre- song explanations. "This one's about meeting someone on the fourth floor, in Russian Literature", he'll say, or "This song is about self-disgust, and how to combat it by asking someone on a date". His most telling statement of all, however, is almost throwaway: "I still believe that every sentence matters". Bravo to that.

According to a borrowed lit-crit essay by David Foster Wallace on their homepage, the Californian quartet Cold War Kids aspire to the status of "anti-rebels", eschewing irony and subversion, and favouring sincerity and sentimentality. Listening to their second album, Robbers &Cowards, and hearing lines like "100 of solitude... and only 12 years old", you'd be forgiven for thinking they're not averse to a bit of postmodern referentialism themselves. In the flesh, however - earnest, close-cropped, sensibly-dressed young men with fluffy facial hair - their story stands up. CWK's jerky blues- rock (imagine Tom Waits meets Pavement), leavened with the odd poetry interlude, undeniably has its charms.

When you remember that they are all committed Christians, and that religious themes pepper their lyrics, the charm catches a chill. When singer Nathan Willett looks us in the collective eye, is it paranoid to wonder: does he want to entertain us, or save us?

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