The sound of young Scotland

IF, LIKE me, you were born in central Scotland, for some reason as yet unidentified by sociologists it is your birthright to have an easy familiarity with the entire recorded works of The Velvet Underground and Big Star.

Seriously, there are more lovers of either band within 20 yards of Glasgow's Halt Bar than there ever were in New York or Memphis during their heyday.

Accordingly, I'm willing to bet that Scotland's Ally Kerr is no stranger to White Light/White Heat and No. 1 Record: just bend an appraising ear towards Off The Radar's title track, which applies taut new wave discipline to a chunky Velvets riff bed.

More pertinently, the sweet-natured, lovelorn ruefulness and high-capoed acoustic guitar of Is It Too Late To Work For NASA and The Toothbrush Song betray a deep and significant love of Big Star's gentler side: the latter track in particular is an absolute ringer for Chris Bell's gorgeous You And Your Sister - not that there's anything remotely wrong with that.

Before you go thinking that this album is just a mere exercise in hat-doffing, I should make it abundantly clear that Ally is actually a strong and distinctive songwriter in his own right, one who favours cheerful major chords and neatly resolved, linear melodies (Could Have Been A Contender, I Think I'm Bleeding). His light, unaffected tenor pleasingly calls to mind Stephen Duffy, and Belle & Sebastian fans should approve of his smart, vulnerable narrative voice, but Ally is very much his own man.

The rock classicist in me - did I just write that?! - approves wholeheartedly of the melody-referencing low piano/guitar solo (a la 1963 Beatles) in Be The One, and I got pleasantly lost within myself listening to the lovely, unhurried coda of Footprints, with its stoical brushed snare. Ally and his band evidently didn't want to stop going round those chords, and I didn't want them to stop either.

I haven't lived in Scotland since 1981 and, finally, I'm starting to miss it terribly: but at the time when I left, the clubs were full of bands who sounded like Parka do now. Attack Of The Hundred Yard Hardman, the debut album by these "raucous Scottish indie guitarslingers", is skittery, hyperactive punk/funk. They sound like Rip Rig & Panic fronted by what in Glaswegian terms can only be described as a bampot.

You can imagine the kind of thing, I'm sure: hectoring vocals, Pigbag trumpet, eights on the hi-hat I put in some long hours with this stuff first time round, thanks all the same, and I can't imagine I'll feel tempted to revisit it any day soon. Younger and fresher fellows, however, should have no problem being geed up by a Kasabian-style rabble-rouser such as There's A Riot (Goin' On) or, er, Fratellis-style rabble rousers such as Wake Up Call and Better Anyway.

Their bobbing punchbag relentlessness is occasionally charming (I Don't Wanna Fight You Tonight, Hoxton Hair) but the laddish repetition of "OH - OH - OH" motifs in several of the songs does get old very quickly. Worse still, Stay Away sounds like it could be an Oasis B-side, a fate I wouldn't wish on anything.

By way of total contrast, I have also been gifted this week with "best of" compilations from The Platters and Johnnie Ray. Even I am not old enough to go a bundle on The Platters, I'm afraid: I can appreciate the craft, the soul and the pained sincerity involved in time-honoured ballads such as Only You, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Twilight Time and The Great Pretender, but it all makes for a bit of a claustrophobic listen, if I'm honest, and has one yearning for the invention of rock.

Johnnie Ray, however, is another matter. He was no stranger to the overwrought ballad form himself, of course, as Cry and The Little White Cloud That Cried amply and mawkishly demonstrate, but it was his onstage delivery that really sealed the deal. This proto-Iggy Pop threw himself around like a marionette, cried real tears, balled his hands into fists of impotent frustration and nutted the piano in paroxysms of uncontrollable angst. And this was all in the mid-1950s.

An industrial-sized pink hearing aid completed Ray's image - Morrissey famously appropriated this particular touch - and an entire generation of women duly liquefied, and wanted to mother him.

It comes as some surprise, therefore, to be reminded of how upbeat much of Ray's repertoire was: Hernando's Hideaway, Yes Tonight Josephine, Just Walkin' In The Rain, Such A Night... chipper, strolling finger-clickers all, radiant with prelapsarian innocence and an enviable joie de vivre.