Clinic

A great line-up, this: three acts with their own distinctive artistic bent, toiling under one label to achieve the same Domino effect.

Wild Beasts’ outlandish flights of fancy could easily fall flat in Scala’s spacey surrounds, but the divisive Pennine-straddling outfit aren’t a band to shirk a challenge, and proceed to deliver a masterclass in brilliant, otherworldly pop; shades of Sparks and The Smiths jostling with a weird, pre-war sensibility that’s hard to put your finger on exactly. It’s to their credit that this doesn’t come across as mere muso-ish posturing, and as difficult as their idiosyncratic vision undoubtedly is, Wild Beasts have an abundance of melodies to sweeten the deal.

Similarly arty of aspiration, yet a million miles removed from the former band’s playful pop edge, are These New Puritans, kicking off proceedings with a lurching three-note riff like Wire with evil intent. But where most bands content themselves with simply rehashing the usual post-punk suspects with diminishing returns, These New Puritans achieve the desired alienation effect by joining the dots all wrong. Hence they are able to move from towering, brutalist constructs of lumbering bass and portentous drums, like Einsturzende Neubauten if they bothered to write songs (‘En Papier’), to full-tilt disco-punk booty shakers about long-dead poets (‘Sixteenth Century’), and on to the propulsive, sinister illogic of ‘Numerology’ with consummate ease.

Sporting a barnet that resembles a vicious parody of a Beatles mop-top, Jack Barnett aims at bolstering his talismanic credentials with a possessed-looking performance, barking percussive vocals while continually grasping at some unknowable point in mid-air, as if the band’s muse was hovering tantalisingly out of reach.

Clinic are as frightening an image as ever clad in doctors’ masks, this time completing the look with black top hats that make them resemble fearsome pedlars of some weird occult medicine. Which they are, in a way – Ade Blackburn presides over his keyboard, dredging up dread-soaked organ blares somewhere between the '60s garage records they revere and Phantom Of The Opera.

The band do Lancastrian funk a la Mondays, Betas et al, only with metallic hooks clanking over the top like chains in a torture chamber, as well as taut, rising-panic garage rockers to get the enthusiastic crowd bopping like escaped mental outpatients. There’s a new song (didn’t catch the title – sorry!) which is all pulsing bass like an unclean thing introduced to Hartley’s buzzing, surgical-precision guitar to satisfyingly splattercore effect. If there is a fault, it’s that there’s nothing here to break them out of the glass ceiling they seem to have hit as middleweight indie-sloggers; nothing that really grabs the imagination and stays with you beyond the lingering image of the masks.

Still, the familiar set list goes down a treat with the packed house after the comparatively unknown pleasures of two of Domino’s most exciting new acquisitions.