When the great Rory Gallagher's album Top Priority was re-released in recent years, it contained a bonus track named "The Watcher", whose sound was described as "surf rock". It was the best song on the album, and I thought I recognised echoes of it in "Astro Coast", which has turned out to be hands-down the best album of 2010 thus far.What remarkable talent seems to emerge from nowhere. Just when you think the music industry has time for nothing but bubblegum Britneys, along comes a band like Surfer Blood that have talent to burn.This is not merely a question of genre. I know nothing at all about surf rock, but I do know that I like the cut of these guys already. Their debut album has a raw energy to it that I haven't heard in years. The first three songs have a grinding, under-processed strength to them that's hard to top, and the texture of their music truly sets them apart.The most fascinating thing about "Astro Coast", however, is the manner in which the band have defied the usual rock convention of verse/chorus, verse/chorus, instrumental, verse/chorus. From memory, virtually every song on this album either manages to mix up this sequence (without at all losing coherence) or makes small adjustments thereto which keeps the listener on edge. It takes talent to do that, and this reaches its apogee in the six-minute "Anchorage", which halfway through segues into another melody entirely, after which the cadence plays out with pounding, driving brilliance.One caveat. I really dislike it when rock bands use bad language or make casual mention of cocaine: Surfer Blood did one of each here (tracks 2 and 10): these were careless blots flung down upon a great canvas. Drug references and swear-words in rock music always sound phoney-tough to me. The band don't need to add these curlicues: they've already proved their street-cred with an outstanding album.What will Surfer Blood do next? I imagine that once they have clocked up a second album, they may (like Vampire Weekend) be able to do an international tour. On the evidence of "Astro Coast", I don't even want to wait for another CD to hope that they will play in Sydney some day. Well done guys.