Data.Select.Party

Out on the streets, the situation is getting desperate. Roving packs of Guinness advertisements are menacing passers-by and, on Shaftesbury Avenue, there’s a fiddle-player trying to entice people into the gleaming cauldron of violence masquerading as a bar. But deep in the bowels of The Social St Patrick’s Day _is_ a reason to celebrate – Big Scary Monsters are having a party! Even if the outside world wasn’t such a heinously shit parade of idiots in massive hats this would still be the event of choice for, well, sane people.

First up are new kids on the block Flash! Flash! Flash! Photography, proving that having a truly execrable name is no barrier to writing decent songs. While their greenness is evident in spades the quality of their actual music is somewhat handicapped by their cribbing of stage moves from practically every pop band to have played a gig since 1986. While the performance is stilted to the point of being a series of in-jokes there’s no doubting their potential, and once they stop pretending not to take themselves seriously there’s every chance they could become rather well-loved indeed.

But next, the first ever performance from band formerly known as Days Ago, Capitals. Blowing away – no, eviscerating – the cobwebs that have grown over months of inactivity they are a flurry of violent angles, all sharp edges and brutal riffs. Despite frontman Ivano only spending a song and a half onstage and practically no time whatsoever facing the considerable crowd they are a beautiful mix of We Are The Romans-era Botch and the frenzied, shrill yelps of Glassjaw’s first album. No band this new has any right to be this good – they’re raw to the point of practically dripping with blood. Now all they need to do is record some songs and they’ll no doubt turn into one of those bands people don’t like, but adore.**

Tubelord, hailing from Kingston, are becoming old hands at this ‘bring the fucking noise’, lark. For a trio they certainly surprise with the veracity of their performance, with a depth of sound to ‘Feed Me A Box Of Words’ and ‘Night Of The Pencils’ that is surprising to say the least. They deal in deliriously spazzy pop tunes fed through a mincer and spat out like so much detritus, switching gears from fuzzed up dancepunk to edgy, rough post-hardcore in the blink of an eye. Again, like 3FP and Capitals they’re by no means the finished product but have so much potential that if they were a 15-year-old footballer from Durham Sir Alex Ferguson would be wetting himself. God bless BSM.