The Blood Brothers

Who knows where all the ladyeees have gone?! Are there any about? At all? Possibly? Here chick, chick, chick...? Do you know there wasn't a single girl on the Main Stage at Reading this year? Ladykind is certainly suffering from a lack of musical representation, and although it looks like Courtney Love is about to come back ablazin', our little alternative scene could really benefit from some female-fronted, boundary-busting, GRRRrrrl bands. It's a good thing then that Pretty Girls Make Graves are fronted by a lovable kick-ass punk rock riot fem. Well, at least it would be if they got big, which isn't exactly on the cards...

Sure, tonight we hear some great tunes from PGMG full of quirky riot grrrl rock promise, but I get the feeling this one's a kid's club chicken nugget meal. Maybe an apple pie - if you're lucky - but certainly not a Big Mac. Husky whiny American shouting comes backed by cheese grater guitars scratching their way through the audience. It's great! It's good. It's... been done before. And after the third or fourth song we get bored.

To say that Blood Brothers alleviate that boredom is an understatement. Two singers take it in turns to shove their heads down boredom's tiny ears, and scream a brain fryingly complex collection of emo-jazz-post-hardcorepunk vocals at top volume, until Boredom's skull implodes. That's the last we'll hear from him.

Sometimes, in the quiet times, when it's easier to stand in the pit without getting mullered by German metallers (or Raz), *BB* take to the keyboard for some organ soothing tinkering. It's short lived. Soon epic guitars that sound like jagged flint scraping blackboards fit for hell begin to rock, the fro'd bassist adds to the eclectricity and the drummer... he kicks the shit out of the drums.

Magic. The next step on from the emo styles of Glassjaw or At The Drive-In. Think Sikth if they were punk rock and not corporate metal and you'd be coming close, but nothing prepares you for how they really are.