The Mary Janes eat, sleep, drink but mostly play music. In the eighteen months since they got together they have played over 300 gigs in every corner, crevice and bog-hole of this country. What is more, The Mary Janes love music in an unadulterated, simple and innocent fashion. It’s not something they want to be seen with, to wear and look cool in, or to drop the name of in hip and fancy places; no, it’s something they genuinely love.

Drummerless, The Mary Janes are three: Mic on vocals and acoustic guitar, Simon on guitars, and Karl on bass. They are not a folk group. Their debut album, Bored Of Their Laughing, exhibits a type of music which is sign-posted by Mic’s charged, expansive and almost freeform singing, rhythms which bound along like they are riding down a mountain stream, and as electric lead flourishes from Simon which stalk and attack.

The Mary Janes are fans of dance music, though they obviously prefer the unique sense of occasion which a live gig can create. They tend to surprise first-time punters by the fact that they are neither quite rock nor folk. Simon: “Half the time these people stand there and they’re watching. And they listen for drums. They come up to us after and say, ‘Oh, I could hear drums in this part.’ But that’s because you’re listening for it. You refuse to accept that it’s something new, something different.”

Lyrically, The Mary Janes are a bit of a journey down the rainbow of (sub)consciousness. Occasionally, sparkling and lucid lines like, “And waking up in cages/No bigger than my thumb,” will appear in the flux, but generally it is a race across uncharted wordscapes such as: “Hey left with pink I’m dead/Oh give me green instead/To keep the fullness of my eyes/Watched by the baron cross.”

Mic readily agrees that his song-writing is not carried out like some A-to-B process. “I might write a song,” he explains, “ and three months later I’ll be onstage singing it and I’ll go: ‘Oh, that’s what that’s about’.” He mentions Liz Frazer from the Cocteau Twins as an influence. “I always found what she does amazing,” he says. “Because she doesn’t actually use words, or she uses her own words. I always have a real thing about that.”

Listening to Bored With Their Laughing, I can hear a similar exploration of the word, as Mic tests and stretches it, spreading his voice between its roots. It’s a highly emotional, even spiritual album. It comes from a group who are evolving, exploring, learning as they go.

As Simon puts it: “Definitely the most important thing about us is that we haven’t contrived any of this at all. We work hard at it. We work really hard. Late nights all the time, like. Gigs round the country. Everything. And when we play gigs it is always as good as we can get it. But definitely we haven’t planned any of it, not at all . . . It’s playing music. See, it’s more the music. It’s what I feel most comfortable doing, and what I have to do. The one thing I truly believe in is that I have to do this.”

• Gerry McGovern