Chameleonic Vines Rock the House

Joining the growing parade of raw, stripped-down rock bands (the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives, etc.), the Vines played the requisite big-buzz show at a jampacked Troubadour on Tuesday, showcasing songs from its debut album, “Highly Evolved,” which will be released in July by Capitol Records.

Well in step with rock’s new austerity, the Australian quartet distills three decades of guitar noise into stark bursts of melodic energy. Now that it’s de rigueur to work with a limited palette, bands such as the Vines can thrive by making do with less. For the most part, the sound came straight from the garage, but with an undercurrent of sexual menace. Frontman Craig Nicholls’ vocals slithered and sputtered around the band’s euphoric melodies, occasionally ramping up into a tongue-wagging squelch.

Like the Strokes’, the Vines’ sound is a triumph of pastiche. The band can be chameleonic, shifting from tart power-pop to the distorted crescendos of old-school grunge, only to settle comfortably into a limpid ballad about “Mary Jane” (get it?). Nicholls already has the rumpled insouciance of a veteran rock god--every casual tousle of his shaggy mane seemed premeditated.

But to ask a band like the Vines to deliver on the promise of so much hype is to do it a disservice. Its appealingly modest rock accomplished exactly what it sets out to do.