With The Cure 'fessing up to Mogwai's work being a big influence on their new album, it's fitting that Oasis have been busy name-checking another bunch of young hopefuls as an influence on their sound. In this case it's The Beta Band who get the Gallaghers' nod. (Incidentally, Oasis have just cottoned on to Cotton Mather, who they'll be bringing on tour with them in the US).

Like Mogwai, The Beta Band are both odd and Scottish, don't sell that many records, but are capable of causing excitable prose in impressionable rock/fashion magazine circles. If you can get your head around a sound that's part "post-grunge balladry and part ambient break-beat", then you're doing better than most people when it comes to understanding them. And the band themselves don't make the job any easier, as they only pop up to issue fractious remarks - such as, that nobody should buy their debut album because it's crap.

It's not just Oasis who cite them as influences, it's also Blur. Not that The Beta Band care either way: they told Noel Gallagher that "he should go and write his own songs and stop listening to us", while they reserved a bit more venom for Blur, saying "there are people making money off the back of what we've done now. We're the twats at the bottom who have been doing all the groundwork for imbeciles like Blur who have now stepped in with their amazing new sounds. Where the f . .k did they get that from?"

The Beta Band have been trundling along since 1997 in a sort of underground Belle-and-Sebastian type way - their first three initial EPs (all on limited release) now change hands for £40 a go, even though they were all gathered together on the cryptically-titled Three EPs album, two years ago. The debut proper, The Beta Band, followed last year and although it only sold about 20,000 copies, word of mouth ensured they could sell out large-scale venues like Glasgow's Barrowlands.

Not indie enough for one ghetto and not dancey enough for another, their work is usefully described in a running-for-cover way as "post-rock" - meaning that it's very raw and unproduced but somewhere deep down lies the nucleus of great songs that never seem to be fully realised. It's their sheer undefinability that frustrates guitarist/vocalist Steve Mason.

"People in Britain don't understand what we're doing," he says, "Over here they're so riddled with the concept of irony and the whole strange music scene that seems to go on, especially in London, that they can't see the wood for the trees. They see something and they're always trying to look behind it to see what's propping it up. When I said what I said about our album being crap, they immediately thought that it was some idea to sell it! You can't be honest - there's no room for honesty any more and it's a shame really, because it's letting the people who read the magazines down."

They are, they insist, quite serious about what they see as the shortcomings on their album, but are more sanguine about their new single, To You Alone, which has just gone on release. "Combining the ideas that we have, some of the organic ideas with the electronic production worked this time," says Mason. "This time we've got some decent guys working on the case and when you've got someone working the equipment you can try things out in a split second. To You Alone is a great marriage of everything that is good about The Beta Band, and everything that I'm looking forward to about the music which we're going to be making in the future."

So if you want to know where Oasis and Blur go for their inspiration, give the Beta Band album a go. It's not as bad as they say it is.

The Beta Band album and the To You Alone single are both on Regal Recordings.