Music Is My Boyfriend w/ Gay Against You

Debut gigs are normally sparsely attended, shambolic affairs. However, thanks largely to their members' histories in London post-wave-party-core bands like Shimmy Rivers and and Canal, Hands On Heads and Operation Wolf, Hundreds Tens and Units' own one, for Music Is My Boyfriend, is rammed, and the band impressively developed. It's female-lead percussive party music, noisy fun tightly corralled into pop structures, like Black Eyes meets Help! She Can't Swim, but funner. Occasionally it feels like it could do with more melodic vocals, but it’s still catchy and brilliant.

House Mouse has one idea and that is to be a large sweaty man in a mouse costume hoodie with a microphone strapped to his face by a ninja mask, pressing play on a laptop vomiting Squarepushing spazz breaks, and playing Large Rock on his Casio DG 20 synth guitar. As ideas go, it’s a pretty great one, but it comes across rather as an advert for the guitar and its contemporary uses that anything memorable or varied musically. It takes balls to put on a performance like this, and a lot of skill to make backing tracks like that, but it does get old pretty quickly.

Musically Gay Against You are very good. Hyper-intense spazzed-out synth pop. Digital Hardcore with the frowns turned upside down. And you can hear it on their records or on their MySpace. And this is pretty much exactly what you hear live. But that’s not really _it_ at all.

Sure, people are starting to know what to expect from the GAY live (I know it’s cheesy, but fuck it) experience, so tonight doesn’t have the same adversarial thrill as their show at scene-hole the Old Blue Last a few months back, which left half the audience seething and the other half ejaculating, but what they loose in remarkably confrontational punk rock points is made up for by this.

This is what every gig should be like. Every gig that you've ever enjoyed the music of but have been straight-jacketed by indie orthodoxy into standing politely tapping-your-feet-to is shown up as a waste of time, life and opportunity when you could have been living this ULTIMATE PARTY.

This is a whole room of people experiencing collective orgasm, spasming and screaming and laughing and drawing in crayons on the floor and crowd surfing and grinning so hard they can barely breathe. The two ringleaders running around making sure that everyone is as involved as possible, screaming pop awesomeness whilst the laptop pumps out barrages of colourful, joyous noise and an entirely superfluous drummer beats the shit out of his toy kit.

Any band playing high energy, positive music could make this happen, but they don’t, it takes two little boys in gym shorts shouting about gay unicorns over Ableton Live to show rock the error of its ways, leaving full faith in live music reinstated by a band that really doesn’t ‘make’ much of their music live.