What’s going on? The hard rock café, once a hoary, whorey pig-sty of leatherfaces and tattooed Jim Rose freaks and dribbling idiots has become a think-tank for some of the smartest and yet most visceral bands on the planet.

The last couple of years has seen the Rock Monster rapidly evolve from nu-metal Neanderthal-ism. Migrating while it mutates, it has slouched south by southwest from the urban sprawls of downtown New York and Detroit towards the Bible Belt and the border states, across the Mojave desert, through the barrios of LA and further south still to the ghettos of Mexico and the favelas of Sao Palo.

It’s a many-headed beast, but it also has eyes in the back of those heads, rendering it retro-centric. Move over Jim Dandy and tell the fuckin’ Nuge the news – not even in Sam Snort’s wettest and most torrid dreams could we have envisioned, in this year of Our Lord 2003, a full blown southern boogie revival.

Scroll down apiece to get the skinny on the Kings Of Leon, the product of an itinerant trailer trash Tennessee Pentecostalist background that could’ve been written by Harry Crews, whose debut album Youth And Young Manhood has been widely praised as one of the albums of the year. But even this quartet’s rise to prominence was flagged a couple of years ago by Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers, whose first album was a southern rock opera based on, I kid you not, the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and whose second album Decoration Day gets its release this month.

NOISY LA BLOW-INS

The Truckers aren’t the only ones single-handedly reviving the concept album. Omar A Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixlea Zavala moved from El Paso to LA to form The Mars Volta and hook up with Flea and John Frusciante of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Rick Rubin to create what is for this writer the rock album of the year, Deloused In The Comatorium. Of course, it helps that the pair’s previous band At The Drive-In were the most galvanising noise this side of Nirvana – but if Relationship Of Command was akin to the spring-loaded fury the MC5 unleashed circa Kick Out The Jams, Deloused is closer to the ‘Starship’ co-write with Sun Ra.

More noisy LA blow-ins from the wastelands: Queens Of The Stone Age are reaching the level where it’s unsafe for any band to follow them onstage, having evolved into a sort of post grunge all-star line up of ex-Dwarves, Kyuss, Screaming Trees and Nirvana members, and whose last two records Rated R and Songs For The Deaf welded together elements of The Ramones, Gary Glitter, Charles Mingus and Black Flag into one lethally gonzoid assault.

Like The Mars Volta, the Queens are starting to dig deep into the dark demonic rhythms of Latin, Puerto Rican and Spanish musics (incidentally, bassist Nick Oliveri has just put out his latest Mondo Generator album, and for a side project, it kicks the shit out of most bands magnum opuses). Meanwhile, out in San Diego, Rancid man Tim Armstrong made the most imaginative and tuneful hardcore album of the last five years with his side project The Transplants, while his ex-missus Brody is burning Lollapalooza rubber with The Distillers in the company of The Donnas, Incubus, the Queens and Jane’s Addiction.

Yes, the Janes, a band who did even more than Nirvana and The Pixies to kick-start the alternative rawk whatever-it-was, are back with a new album Strays. And while we’re Californicating, let’s not forget System Of A Down’s bizarre and rather genius splicing of Armenian-American death metal with jerky Dead Kennedys stop-start animatronics and Jethro Tull type prog-folk melodies, all topped off with lyrics that read like graffiti scrawled by an psychiatric outpatient with a degree in political science.

SOAD were possibly the only band to take an explicitly militant anti war-on-Iraq stand, their Michael Moore-directed video for ‘Bang’ being rewarded, if that’s the word, with minimal MTV airplay this spring.

PLATOON OF ENGLISH ECCENTRICS

But then, when you’re on the West Coast even the mellow stuff sounds ominous. The Thrills took their small-town Dublin desperation and writ it large in tunes like ‘One Horse Town’ and ‘Big Sur’ – and are currently thriving both sales-wise and in the critics’ stakes as a result. And Maria McKee, half sister of Love man Bryan MacLean, made High Dive, the best off-Broadway popera you’ll hear this year.

But wait, as they say in the infomercials: there’s more. On their latest album Phoenix The Warlocks are bringing Velvet’s attitude to the LA sunshine/noir dialectic. Meanwhile, back in the UK, Brighton’s 80s B-Line Matchbox Disaster, contrive to sound like Iggy Morrison fronting personnel gleaned from The Cramps, The Gun Club, Thee Hypnotics and The Birthday Party – not a bad trick if you can pull it off.

Not everything that’s fresh and new delves into the metal motherlode. The Coral, from Liverpool, are a platoon, almost, of English eccentrics who look to Lee Hazelwood, Sergio Leone. Captain Beefheart and Scott Walker for their inspiration – but there’s a darkness to the music that suggests a depth to these 20 year olds that can only intensify and get stronger.

Australia too continues to produce music that swarms with possibilities, from the neo-Byrdsian tunes of The Sleepy Jackson to the OTT Tourette-rock of Machine Gun Fellatio.

Add to these such far flung entities as The Datsuns (New Zealand), Soundtrack Of Our Lives (Sweden), and The Raveonettes (Denmark), and the Class of 2003 have what it takes to keep even the most sceptical of rock obsessives absorbed.

You dirty little buggers, you never had it so good.

Over the coming days, hotpress.com will be featuring a series of interviews with some of the leading lights of the current rock revolution. Log on for features on The Datsuns, The Warlocks, Machine Gun Fellatio, The Coral and Kings Of Leon