PLUS ONE MAGAZINE

Chanteuses Melanie Pain and Phoebe Killdeer, rotating vocalists within surprisingly joyful French new wave covers band Nouvelle Vague , recently joined forces, the perfect vehicle to create some self-penned pop nuggets of their own within semi-eponymous side project Kill the Pain .  Tonight sees the Gallic duo opening for their former bandmates at a packed Old Woollen , the first of eight dates together on these shores, Phoebe adorned in a striking tinsel wig (presumably replete with the appropriate fire certification beneath the hot stage lighting) as she emerges from the gloom

  “There’s no escape, like Alcatraz,” goes the mesmeric middle section of the opening song on the debut album from Birmingham psych pop duo Solar Eyes . And it’s certainly easy to get sucked in – before you know it you’ve passed the psych-getti Western stylings of ‘Dreaming of the Moon’ and greasy Oasis-isms of album highlight ‘She Kissed the Gun’, dayglo colours streaming past you as you go. 

Photo credit: Vanessa Heins                METZ are playing us like a fiddle, offering up a brace of new songs to give a tantalising look at where their heads are at on their forthcoming fifth album, and obviously we’ve been sucked in. ‘ 99 ’ shoves upbeat and atmospheric verses down concrete steps for a typically discordant chorus, and ‘Entwined’ takes a sharp left turn for a dreamy middle section bookended by joyful noise.

Whether they’ve wanted it or not, antagonism has dogged IDLES for most of their career. The Bristol band started off  as  the instigators,  going after  everything from  the Tories  to toxic masculinity, before  being pushed towards the back foot at the hands of a rabid media , a strangely militant  haterbase  and, let’s face it, an underwhelming third album (the now all-but-disowned  Ultra Mono ).

                                                                      Photo: Justin Villar With more drummers (two) than guitar strings (zero), Lip Critic are at the marauding vanguard of NYC punk, and pummeling new single 'The Heart' is thrilling and just a little bit stressful. Vocally it's straight up-and-down punk rock, but underneath the song is powered by frenetic work on two samplers - bringing Death Grips comparisons into the conversation isn't very creative but is inevitable. And one of the most pleasing aspects of it all is the pair of drummers are just doubling up the beats rather than intertwining complex rhythms, a means to a sledgehammer end which quite rightly smashes through any semblance of subtlety. A debut album awaits later this year.