Today's idea: Peggy Sue at Resident

The journey of Peggy Sue is a great lesson to bands who occasionally feel hemmed in by the geographical constraints of their early days; playing the same damn venues to the same, familiar audiences. Peggy Sue - the band who, recently signed to Wichita Records and this week released a brave, complex and beautiful debut album, 'Fossils and Other Phantoms' - once consisted of Rosa Rex and Katy Klaw, and traded as Peggy Sue and the Pirates. They seemed to play in Brighton constantly; bringing amateurish, good humoured folk to a band of amused but slightly perplexed punters.

For every moment that their two, perfectly calibrated voices soared, there was another where one drummed clumsily on the back of a stool while the other warbled about being Superman. For those of us who fell totally in love with them back in the early days, their lack of seriousness and musical skill wasn't problematic at all, and an early tide of interest led... nowhere fast. Something - their own ambition, in retrospect - stopped them from recording an album, and instead they added a drummer, began building their reputation nationally, and began crafting more complex, dark songs which counterbalanced their quirkiness and personal chemistry with heavy, heady lyrics about skin, bones, and broken relationships.

All of this has culminated, finally, in their new LP. It's brave not just because the band have come so far from their early days, but because there's not a thing about their sound they haven't worked on. Their arrangements are richer and more confident, their lyrics more beautiful, their old songs ruthlessly jettisoned in favour of newer tracks. In many ways they're an unrecognisable band, having long transcended the likes of Jeffrey Lewis who once inspired them.

Having been unsatisfied, then, with the role of local heroes, Peggy Sue have rowed out further and created real, substantive waves. They're back in Brighton tonight, however, and you can catch them at the perpetually wonderful Resident Records. It's free, and they're onstage at 6.