Cats XI Select All-Dayer

All-dayers regularly look brilliant on paper: a plethora of bands established and not, a bar well-stocked with chilled booze, and usually for an absolute pittance. Sadly, in practice these hours-and-hours-and-hours-long shows can be tests of endurance – despite the attendee’s best intentions, it’s more than often difficult to maintain a consistent level of concentration, and sobriety, for the duration.

With this in mind, I purposefully choose not to arrive until around five in the afternoon – apologies to every band that plays prior to Great Eskimo Hoax, but my little legs and disfigured liver need a lot of TLC on a Sunday. The Pleasure Unit decided some time back, for reasons undefined, to do away with draught, so gig-goers are forced to pay through the nose for barely-cooled bottled lager. As a result, a few handfuls of hang-around-outside sorts flit between venue and off license, topping up their inebriation with cider and miniatures. Me, I ask for a Newcastle Brown at the bar. The best part of a fiver spent later, I don’t make the same mistake again.

Great Eskimo Hoax’s set lasts as long as it takes for the blue star to fade to grey: they’re a welcome distraction from the ale, too, taking a hundred cues from American indie-rockers of twisting turns past – think Cap’n Jazz, American Football, Dismemberment Plan – yet smothering their heard-em-before soundscapes in yelps and jerks entirely of their own manufacturing. In fact, the Birmingham-spawned trio ultimately prove to be one of the (half?) day’s highlights: an unknown act prior to their performance, these senses o’ mine are doused in delight by a series of stop-start-dance compositions that, while hardly jaw-dropping, are rich in potential.

Tired Irie’s best impressions of The Rapture get a few front-row feet tapping in earnest, but their one-dimensionality sours the casual onlooker’s interest as early as the third effort in – they’d no doubt sound fantastic in a club environment, but in a cramped and stuffy space their incessant hi-hat tapping soon surpasses indifference, inching its way through to disaffection. But, a couple of subtle deviations from everything straightforward demonstrate that the group has the ability to craft intriguing complexities – if they choose to concentrate more on affecting the brain than the body’s bottom half, perhaps they’ll earn accolades grander than a shoulder-shrugged s’alright.

Better are the day’s organisers, Cats And Cats And Cats (pictured), although a muggy, fuggy sound spoils their set. The six-piece clutter the small stage and the assembled instruments fail to synchronise, resulting in periods of noise that can be called only that, noise. Nuances are lost to the unforgiving PA’s merciless butchering of the band’s post-rocking rolling with the artsy punches. A rousing ‘Fight Fight With Fight’ has the hardcore bellowing along, but (again) the fair-weather fan is nonplussed by the adoration afforded an act clearly not on their finest form. Cats… have delivered better sets, for sure.

** Tiger Force * and much of Itch’s set are missed due to Matters That Concern You Not, but the latter’s jangly jitter-punk – as indebted to pre-millennial American alt-rock as Great Eskimo Hoax, albeit without the keyboard embellishments – is much-appreciated by the now thinning crowd. Things are running late, but *Meet Me In St Louis aren’t fazed by the drink-addled and visibly tiring throng before them: the Surrey-spawned post-hardcore quintet are the day’s biggest draw judging by how tracks from their debut EP are received. Choruses receive the song-along treatment, and hand-clapped intersections are navigated by many a man, of band and of a punter persuasion. ‘Why Thank You, Suzie’, recently heard on a DiS podcast (download), is concluded by a rapturous session of applause, while the new material mixes intelligence with brutality to truly great effect. At one juncture a smile as wide as Terminal Five threatens to split this face in twain. Truly, Meet Me In St Louis are ones to watch for in 2007, if inventive punk-rock music is your pleasure.