Blood Red Shoes

It begins with a disclaimer, of sorts: “I’ve just had tonsillitis,” says drummer Steve, a chest-bearing throat-shredding front man in a former musical life. We’re to forgive him if his vocals crack under the strain of recent illness. As it happens, they go the distance fine.

That said, it’s not like we’d notice a slight deviation from the path marked melodious – Blood Red Shoes, live, do not make a beeline for the safety net of pop sensibility over primal punk rock noise, whatever their on-record modus operandi. The band’s other half, Laura-Mary, hacks at her guitar strings as if her hand’s a tomahawk and her instrument’s a Wild West stereotype’s scalp. She screams more often than she sings, repeating “I hate you!” ‘til the walls are stained redder still by the outpourings of two-dozen perforated eardrums.

The object of the hate is unclear, and the tone of menace an unlikely aural partner to a pair who, aesthetically alone, look as if they wouldn’t swot a troublesome fly with a rolled up broadsheet supplement. Appearances, though, are so very often misleading: though he’s still best known as a fret-throttling member of the defunct Cat On Form, Steve pounds his drums with the incessant intensity of a mischievous child who’s picked up his dad’s clawhammer and taken it to the easy-splintering airing cupboard door. He smiles with evil intent, switching attention away from his kit only to make brief eye contact with his co-conspirator in crime prior to another thud-thud-thud-SLAM blast of unbridled noise. Well, there is a melody there, somewhere… problem is it’s utterly destroyed by the PA’s unwillingness to highlight the songs’ higher frequencies. Bass drum beating mercilessly against the assembled throng's sensory receivers, Blood Red Shoes come on like Comanechi with less hair, or them Whites if they'd been raised in gutter punk clubs: totally entrancing.

Then it ends, sooner than expected (although the band, to date, has only a 7” to their name). Ears are fingered ‘til a semblance of hearing slides back into gear (although my personal tinnitus may stem from Mudhoney's earlier performance), and the band – the duo whose sweet looks utterly belied their dangerously bombastic set – slink away to the corner shadows. With a little fine-tuning, they’ll be stepping out from them permanently in the extremely near future.