Blindness

It's difficult to envisage Dalston, or indeed any part of East London, without visualising this, or even this. OK, so perhaps we're being a little unfair on one of the capital's most multicultural, self-sufficient neighbourhoods but in recent years, its name has become synonymous with hipsters. The type of which most sane folk would move to the other side of the country to avoid. One of its most popular havens is the Shacklewell Arms, just a stone's throw away from Dalston Kingsland station. From the outside it looks like one of those places your parents told you to avoid as a teenager. Where old men venture to drink mild and play dominoes. And yet, for all its old school vibes resembling a throw back to 1957, it's actually one of the most homely, intimate venues we've stumbled across in many a month. With not a purple chinos and flip flops combo wearing wannabe in sight, it reminds us of one of the Midlands most celebrated and sadly lamented hostelries - Leicester's Princess Charlotte, with the Shacklewell's layout of louge bar at the front, live music hall at the back almost mirroring the aforementioned, albeit in a somewhat scaled down form.

Having established itself as one of London's prime venues on the touring circuit, tonight's line-up courtesy of the up-and-coming Symptomatic group is both eclectic and incredibly obtuse in terms of the three bands on the bill. Take openers Hunting Party for example, a band who've barely been together a year. Indeed, tonight is only their twelfth show, yet already there's something quite charismatic about their schizophrenic math-tinged post-rock. Opener 'Dead Echoes' ticks all the relevant boxes. Twin guitarists Matt Wash and James Pain slip between glitchy melodic passages with metallic spurts lifted straight off the Rock Action template. That two of the five songs they play tonight are untitled tells its own story. The first of those surges in behemoth fashion, its heavily tribal rhythms giving way to Q And Not U picks here and Animal Collective style aloofness there. Penultimate number 'Battlecry' also pushes the boundaries way beyond your typical mathrock template, its furious three-way vocal crescendo denting the ceiling if not quite raising the roof just yet. Ultimately still a work in progress, it would be churlish to litter Hunting Party with deft superlatives or utter bold predictions as to where they might be heading. However, their progress in such a short space of time suggests they're worth keeping an eye and ear to the ground for.

When fellow London-based outfit Creatures Of Love (pictured) take to the stage one could be forgiven for thinking they've walked onto the set of a Francis Ford Coppola movie. Singer Bonita McKinney dressed head to toe in a long black veil, electric blue strobes filtering through the darkness, her two conspirators Chris Willsher and Ben Gardner barely visible as silhouettes either side. While appearances can sometimes be deceptive, here it adds to the mystique of their heavily industrial repertoire. Comparisons range from Esben & The Witch and Zola Jesus - whose 'Stridulum' they remixed last year - to the more refined Diamanda Galas or early nineties noiseniks Sunshot. Last year's excellent self-released EP Boy Crimes should have received far more attention than it did, and with the bulk of tonight's set lifted from that release they're an even more potent force in the flesh. 'Knossus' might just be the missing link between Siouxsie Sioux's Kaleidoscope and Hyena phases while 'Voyeurs' blends Edge-style riffs alongside ear shredding beats, all decisively held together by McKinney's taut vocal range. 'Sutra Sweat' takes death disco to an almost Germanic extreme reminiscent of Claudia Brucken and Propaganda in their mid-eighties heyday. Meanwhile closing number 'Vakkula' rouses sonic armageddon, its mantra-like coda shaking the Shacklewell's foundations long after Creatures Of Love have left the stage.

Headliners Blindness have been creating a storm around London's underground music scene for some time now, and if tonight's performance is anything to go by it's easy to see why. With the emphasis firmly placed on the word "performance", they're a refreshing breath of fresh air in a stale world of male dominated asymmetric fringes and studied poses. Main mouthpiece and all-round action woman Beth Rettig could be a hybrid of Florence Welch and Karen O if one were to exist. Aesthetically at least. Thankfully her onstage persona has more in common with the latter, and on recent Club AC30 single 'Glamourama' their BritGlamGarageGaze mash-up makes perfect, logical sense. Ably flanked by one-time Echobelly and Curve guitarist Debbie Smith and a rhythm section oozing tenacity and pizzazz, it's left to closing epic 'Serves Me Right' to exorcise any demons withstanding that the traditional guitar-orientated band has no purpose left to serve in 2013.

Photo courtesy of Andy Wright
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