'Breaking The Silence', the thirteen track album from The Crave, arrived with a list of impressive festival appearances and support slots (on both sides of the Atlantic) that the young band have garnered since their inception and as soon as I put the proverbial needle on the record it wasn't hard to understand why as I had just discovered one of the slickest, most professional self released albums that I had heard in some time.

A thirteen track album? A little self-indulgent, I thought. Then I listened to the album. And again. In fact, I have listened to this album many times since it arrived for review and I have yet to find a poor track amongst the baker's dozen tunes on offer. Some songs may be the lesser cousins of others but, generally, we're talking about over a dozen tunes that each have anthemic qualities and huge potential for commercial success.

The influences I hear throughout the album, and some soundalikes that I'm sure these guys couldn't possibly have been inspired by, all point in the same direction - highly infectious songs with larger than life pop sensibilities and, honestly, massive genre-blurring commercial possibilities. There are anthemic choruses swathed in gang vocals that people of my age would call Leppard-esque but, to the younger generation, are of the kind found on that last self-titled Simple Plan album. But Simple Plan are just one of several melody-cursed bands who I hear when I play 'Breaking The Silence'. Again.

On the more emotional moments it's hard not to think of Something Corporate and there are definitely sections - 'Defector' for instance - where fans of Kids In Glass Houses would raise a plucked eyebrow. There are times when the sounds could be coming from the highly stylised mouths of a boy band, and I say that not disparagingly but with the realisation that some of these songs have mammoth breakout potential. Jesus, on songs like 'Silently Screaming' you can almost taste the salt of teen girl tears.

And while I'm sure that the band's gigs will resemble the patronage of the Just Seventeen problem page, there is enough rock spattered throughout the album to satisfy the most ardent of melodic rock fans. I've already mentioned Simple Plan - 'High', 'Truth Hurts' and the album's title track will have you thinking of the Canadian pop punkers - but there are a couple of, dare I say it, ancient (!) bands that keep forcing their way into my thoughts when listening to the album; Gun are one, listen to 'All Of You' and opening track 'Cooking In The Kitchen' and you should understand my thinking, but the other are long-lost (and wholly underrated) LA alt rockers School Of Fish. It's hard to believe that that great, self-titled School Of Fish album is now twenty years old, maybe harder to believe that it is over a decade since frontman Josh Clayton-Felt was cruelly taken from us, but I can't help but think of that late, great band when I hear songs here like 'Mercenary Man'.

...and that would normally be enough, mention of those bands alone would see me revisiting this album but, and this is key, I keep coming back because every day - seriously - since first hearing this album, the mystery song in my head has always been by The Crave. There are thirteen of the catchy bastards swimming around in my head and I just can't get them out. How long this will last before I want to track down each band member and mercilessly slaughter them is debatable. But until that breaking point I will keep coming back to this record and, given the chance to discover it, I am convinced that legions of other people would do the same.

'Breaking The Silence', available directly from the band now before a full release this Spring, may be a little too lightweight for some rock fans but if you live for big hooks, tearjerking ballads, whoah-ohs, simply effective riffs and sugar-coated future pop rock classics then this is the album for you. Recommended.

www.myspace.com/thecraveband