SHAMEFUL though it is to steal another critic’s words, a reviewer once summed up the voice of Dougy Mandagi, frontman of The Temper Trap, thus: “He could sing about watering the garden and make your heart melt.”

Be advised, this Australian four-piece are a big new force in indie-pop, tight in all the right places, lyrically expressive, but it is around Mandagi’s magnificent falsetto vocals, at times soaring, at others faltering and broken, that their musical creation hits real highs.

Soldier On, for instance, is a beautiful song – a ballad that begins quietly, if moodily, and builds to an angry frenzy of guitar and voice.

But the Melbourne-based band also like to bang their own drums, giving the basis of many of their songs an almost tribal feel, and the instrumental Drum Song formed a wild and loud centerpiece to their nearsell- out O2 Academy show, with the entire band helping Toby Dundas with his stickwielding duties. Any devotee of The Temper Trap’s debut album, Conditions, will have been thrilled – they played every song off the record.

The North-East audience – “probably the best ‘wooh’-ing we’ve ever heard” - was brought to life by the singles Love Lost, Fader and the brilliant Sweet Disposition.

And the band’s one departure from the album sleeve notes, new song Rabbit Hole, suggests The Temper Trap still have an anthem or two to offer.

But the crowning glory of their night on Tyneside was their parting number, the newly-released single Science of Fear, which culminated with Mandagi stepping off the stage and singing the closing verses while being lifted and jostled by his fans. How to win friends and influence record purchases...

■ Superb support came from fellow Antipodean Sarah Blasko, sweet, eccentric and intoxicating, with shades of Cerys Matthews, and arguably standing tallest among contemporary vocalists in the same vein as Joanna Newsom.

Dave Horsley