Twisted Charm annoy me. On record, at least, their music - perhaps intentionally - riles; wheeling around like a leering drunk in a sober room and spiking up in hoots of mule sax that sound like party horns and feel like dead arms.

After tolerance has ceased and the cheap digs begin to nag, a question gets begged - why are they so very narky? The answer, the art-rock justification for the heavy head, is that the 'Boring Lifestyles' they map on treaded suburban streets really are getting to them. They really are bored; and the toots and the nasal nags are the equivalent of drumming fingers or tapping feet. Bedroom window body language at the end of a cultural cul-de-sac.

Under live lights it's not a completely different story, but it is one with an alternate ending. Onstage in Soho tonight, the quartet resemble a clunking, black VW Beetle; albeit one with neons and slime green piping. It's easier to place them in the flesh, easier to reckon you have some kind of handle when you can pick and choose who and what you really listen to. It sounds easier for them, also, as the relationship between band and crowd sashays into the kind of empathy that grows in the distance between a dozer and a trapped, buzzing fly. I keep my eyes on them as they meander tonight, more comfortable with an irritation I can pinpoint.

There's Nathan Doom. The stick-thin voice of Twisted Charm moons around the stage in a series of three-minute tantrums, sequined jacket bouncing light from the disco ball back. Now there's a glare in the memory that's seen as a beam; Nathan searched out by his own, DIH spotlight. The singer's more personable tonight - unlike on record, where at times the mix makes him a waspish, floating head covered in snot 'cause he hasn't the hands to wipe his nose. Slogans are dispensed. The spirit of Albarn is invoked. You know that 'Tracy Jacks'? Grew up and joined a legion of 'Whores'. Yeah, that's what they say. 'Broken Girl', 'Phoney People', 'Jealousy'. Their set-list reads like a scrawled note passed round bitchy schoolgirls.

Stage right, there's Luke Georgiou. The saxophonist and Doom are the main draws for eyes and ears; cutting insistent melodic detours from the locked down rhythm section before returning some time shortly after. The obvious reference point is James Chance - the bass pootles along just as lonely; head down, mid-tempo. It's not a bad reference point at all, but at times it's a point that feels slightly laboured, ordered - perhaps because these songs have been around long enough for them to have been heard at DiS's first show of 2003.

In the more recent past, I saw Liars at White Heat a month ago tonight. That evening, the band were inhibited by something and my brain felt like the throbbing bass in their songs; rattling around caged in a skull of treble which it was doomed never to escape. It shook and blunted me so hard that my brain felt like a baby trying for birth from thick head bone. See Liars’ name on a headstone as their ideas died stillborn inside.

Twisted Charm suffer from a lack of imagination which prevents them from reaching even this stage. The potential is there, you feel. Turn a light on. More chaos boys. And why not - it's surely an excuse for fun. But then it's easy to imagine that Twisted Charm don't want to allow us, or even themselves, to get too greedy with the fun.

"Perhaps there are too many guitar bands, too many leather jackets and pretend rockers, too many three chord tricks and it's against this six-string zeitgeist that Twisted Charm are operating."

Honourable sentiments, no doubt. But it's that first word that resonates loudest after tonight's show. Twisted Charm would do well to dispense with their precautionary 'perhaps' and have the courtesy to trust us, and themselves, to grapple with the full weight of their sad-eyed, street-lit convictions.