The debut album from this energetic Brighton four-piece is a foot-stomping burst of punked country rock. There'll be no stopping the Brakes in 2007, writes Kevin Courtney.

HERE'S a tip for 2007: if your band isn't going anywhere, just hook up with some guys from other bands and knock off a 30-minute album in double-quick time. Before you know it, your jam band has become bigger than your real band, and your little side-project has become an all-conquering, four-headed behemoth.

It worked for the two guys from The Greenhornes: when they got together with Brendan Benson and the guy out of The White Stripes, they surpassed even their greatest expectations.

Brakes could be called the British Raconteurs, except that singer Eamon Hamilton is mostly Canadian. "I had a Canadian accent until I was 11, and then I went to secondary school and just got it kicked out of me by the other pupils and teachers," he recalls. "So it's kind of a blend of West Country, and with Brighton now as well."

Eamon's bandmates in Brakes are Tom and Alex White from Brighton band The Electric Soft Parade, and Marc Beatty, who plays in Tenderfoot and runs his own studio in Brighton. Eamon used to play keyboards in British Sea Power, but was eking out a living as a singer-songwriter, performing rasping country-punk tunes to whoever was still drinking in the bar. One night in 2002, Tom and Alex were drinking in Palmer's Bar in Brighton, watching Eamon support The Lonesome Organist, and immediately offered to become his guitarist and drummer. They recruited Marc as bassist and recorded their debut album, Give Blood, at Marc's studio. It was done in little more than a day.

"It happened very naturally, really," says Alex. "Electric Soft Parade were on a big label and we had lots of money chucked at us and stuff, but then we were dropped from that label, and there wasn't a lot of work. We sat around for a while, and then we just made the first Brakes record, and it all snowballed."

Giving the snowball a bit of a shove was a track called All Night Disco Party, written as a parody of Tom's taste in early 1990s rave music, but which found its way onto many indie discos of the mid-naughties. And, among the overlong indie epics that seem to take up far too much time on the CD player, Give Blood was a refreshingly short, sharp slap in the face. Most of the tracks clocked in at less than two minutes, but even they seemed like prog-rock meanderings beside Comma Comma Comma Full Stop, a six-second burst of punctuated power.

"It's not really deliberate," insists Eamon. "That's just the way a lot of the songs come out. Sometimes the songs just write themselves, and it's like, OK, this is a good song, even though it's only six seconds long. We all work together so well, there's a kind of ESP in Brakes. If you stick the four of us into a room for four minutes, we'll come up with a song. We work together really quickly and simply."

The songs on new album The Beatific Visions may fly by quickly enough, but there's nothing simplistic about the sentiments expressed in Hold Me in the River, Mobile Communication, Spring Chicken and Cease and Desist. Quickfire political rants such as Porcupine or Pineapple? have more punch than the biggest chest-beating, anti-war anthems, while Isabel and If I Should Die Tonight are gentle, country-sad ballads that help widen the album's vision way beyond its 28-minute allotted time. It's a half-hour burst of guitar-shredding, punked-up, countrified rock'n'roll, without an ounce of fat or excess baggage to drag it down. This is an album on which every riff matters, every line stings and every chorus counts for something.

To make The Beatific Visions, the band swapped Brighton for Nashville, recording the album at House of David studios with help from legendary piano player David Briggs, who has tinkled the ivories with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr, JJ Cale and Elvis. Eamon, for one, was starstruck.

"He supported The Beatles on their Shea Stadium tour, and he was just cracking me up. He came over to England to record with George Harrison, and he was finding these rooms in George Harrison's mansion. He went into one room and found a whole carousel, with horses and everything."

The Beatific Visions is out now on Rough Trade