Settlefish

When Nottingham's Love Ends Disaster hit their stride, they're bang on. Imagine guitars elasticating into infinity and twanging in every direction around your head. It's Interpol sans the bored indifference, sliced across the gullet by six shuddering, electrified strands of metal. They have their peaks and troughs - there are patches of otherness dotted around the likes of 'TV''s fluid melodies and 'Sentai''s lyrical _"I thought I'd killed you in my sleep" crescendo, and DiS can't recall much about them. Nevertheless, Love Ends Disaster have enormous potential.

Settlefish aren't short on potential either, but they have a disappointing habit of detonating their songs with fantastic bouts of noise, only for things to settle into a furrow of unremarkability. Playing a set of almost entirely new material (lifted from their The Plural Of The Choir album, on Deep Elm), for the first three minutes it's like Cedric Bixler fronting Jeniferever, Jonathan Clancy's abrasive vocals fighting for breath amid the whirlpool of pealing guitars that surrounds him. They finish the set in much the same way, tripling the intensity until all that's left is a hail of feedback, echoing around Clancy's righteous bark, but these textural displays of Settlefish's true talent prop up a set that's otherwise unambitious.

Repeatedly explosive, thrilling intros give way to songs that fade into pastel shades of pleasantry, guitars twittering, drums skittering, all of it competent and coherent, but for the most part, woefully spineless. It's intricately assembled, but flat. Now and then, the drums swell into a thunderous shout, but they're restrained as quickly as they let rip. Settlefish can do better than this, but it feels distinctly like they're holding back.