Lyca Sleep

Lesson One.

Put all your favourite CDs in a hat. Jumble them about a bit. Pick them out again one by one. Play them in exactly the same order. Phone your friends. Invite them round for tea and biscuits. Impress them with your no holds barred eclecticism. Suggest forming a rock'n'roll band.

Lesson Two.

Write a bunch of songs with amusing titles, turn your amps up to 12 and then prepare to confuse a whole new generation of kids with your multi-dimensional sound.

I know what you're thinking. "Yeah right, that'll never work. Everything has to fall into a category, surely...?" Wrong.

Take Love Ends Disaster for example. Having survived the initiation from student band hell they've steadily made the transition to serious contenders thanks in no small part to having possibly the most varied range of influences known to man. 'The Smallest Girl In The World' takes the Braithwaite blueprint of primitive post-rock and spits out a frenzied excursion along the darkest, dankest plasma coated elevator. Despite not quite hitting the heights of The Mars Volta, maybe Love Ends Disaster have found a niche worthy of their eclectic talents?

Until they deliver the awesome 'Sendai' that is, with its chiming guitars and discordant "harmonies" between front man Oakes and guitarist Rob sounding like a midnight lecture from David Byrne to Peter Perrett on the horrors of intravenous narcotic abuse and voila! Love Ends Disaster are partying like it's 1979.

With the scene set so admirably by the "guess what's coming next?" paroxysm of L.E.D, Lyca Sleep could be forgiven for just going through the motions before taking the money and heading for the hills, or in this case, Leicester Forest East services. But this is Lyca Sleep, and such preposterously amateurish charades have no place in their distinctly transient universe.

Taking their name from the main character in William Blake's 'The Little Girl Lost', anyone expecting poetic witticisms set to genteel rhythms would be severely mistaken and yet pleasantly surprised by the sheer magnitude of their dynamic multi-layered sound.

It would do them an almighty disservice to just throw in a host of names and compare Lyca Sleep's near-perfect aural escapism to their heroes past and present, but with kindred spirits like The Open already paving the way for monstrous tapestries of sound last heard when Nick McCabe strummed the final chords of 'Gravity Grave', expect to see this lot edging their way to the front of the queue in somewhat dramatic style.

Forthcoming single 'Sold Me A Ride' twists and turns like a slow motion bobsleigh ride through Calgary, while 'Still Life' and 'Are You Awake?' have a sharp-edged ethereal vein running through them meaning Kevin Shields will at last be able to retire gracefully knowing his revolutionary approach to creating beguiling walls of sound haven't gone to waste after all.

Despite several hiccups with the monitors, it's a testament to Lyca Sleep's austentacious self-belief in what they're doing that they triumph emphatically. At this moment in time they are undoubtedly one of the best live bands in the UK. Apparently Mary Ann Hobbs is already a fan, and soon you will be converted too.