Angelspit
Ayria
Ego Likeness
Slimelight, London
Saturday October 6 2007

It's a night of unrepentant bleeps at the Slimelight. The club's usual DJ-driven entertainment is enhanced tonight by three bands from three different corners of the electronic planet. This is the London date of the Electromotion tour, an escapade which will have taken its trio of electronic noisemakers around a large chunk of Old Europe by the time it's over. And here comes the first of those bands, direct - well, slightly indirectly, if you want to get strictly geographical about it - from the USA: Ego Likeness. Now, steady on there, all you guitar-heads. Before you insist that a band just ain't worth a lick unless it features a six-string spanker knocking out the licks, Ego Likeness have just such a person. Stationed towards the back of the stage, Steven Archer thrashes away at a guitar in a flurry of blue dreadlocks. His presence lends a touch of rock 'n' rollness to what is, in other respects, classic pounding elektro-dance rinse-outs, insistent and thunderous, and yet accessible enough to appeal even to those who are not diehard dancefloor warriors. On vocals, Donna Lynch cuts an equally rock 'n' roll figure - all bonde hair and tattoos, she looks like she's got her Harley parked outside. But she makes an engaging electro-frontwoman, friendly and humourous between the songs, then belting out the lyrics like an alternodisco diva as soon as the beatz kick in.

Ayria come from Canada, and are a drums, vocals and electronix trio built around Jennifer Parkin, who I first encountered a few years back when she was synthpopping across the universe in her previous band, Epsilon Minus. But that was then, and this is now. Aryia are all energy and flailing limbs; all boots and hair extensions, and while there's still a hint of the synthpop playground here and there in the music, for the most part we're mixing with the big kids in Beat City. The songs come at the crowd like a stampede, often quite minimal in their arragements but never less than maximal in delivery. There's a distinct sense of Nitzer Ebb-ness in the way the rhythms thunder, in particular on 'The Gun Song', which, if it's not already a club hit (that's 'hit' as in 'wallop straight between the eyes'), it certainly should be soon. In a way it's unusual, but very refreshing, to see this kind of no-shit beat storm with a woman at its centre: the stereotypical focus for this kind of music is all too often a portly bloke with cropped hair and a hoarse shout for a vocal. But then, maybe that's part of the point of this three-band package. All three bands feature women prominently in their line-ups, and definitely not just in the traditional role of fronting music created by the boys in the background. I don't know if this represents some sort of cultural shift, but the soundtrack is suitably emphatic.

Now we come to our third band of the night, and just like the previous acts they hail from one of Olde England's former colonies. Angelspit represent Australia. They also represent a healthy dose of punk attitude, hard-wired to a theremin and some get-stuck-in-matey programming. You want a description in a nutshell? Try this: Angelspit are what would happen if you strapped the UK Subs to Einstein's theory of relativity, and sent them into the future with only a handful of Judge Dredd comics for company. There are two of them: gesticulating mightily at the theremin, clad in a substantial acreage of PVC, please welcome the mighty Zoog. Meanwhile, keeping the sonic maelstrom under control at the vocal mic, and sporting somewhat more minimal PVC, I give you the no less mighty DestroyX. Just possibly these are not their real names, but the rampant racket they generate is entirely real. Angelspit deal in distortion, lots of it, and loud. Their songs thunder like an approaching road train; the electronics crackle like a creek bed in the sun. But it's not just formless noise. The songs are songs. Structure and architecture lurk in the commotion. Suddenly, the commotion stops - the band's laptop has crashed, and taken the entire show down with it. For a moment it all goes a bit Paul Hogan, but the recalcitrant Mac (yep, it's a Mac - you see, they do crash!) is eventually rebooted and the noise kicks in again. Angelspit manage to be both uncompromising and accessible at the same time. They seem vaguely threatening in their Mad Max cybergear, and yet you get the feeling they'd be great people to go to a party with. Just don't ask them to keep the noise down.

Essential links:

Angelspit: Website | MySpace
Ayria: Website | MySpace
Ego Likeness: Website | MySpace

For more photos from this gig, find the bands by name here.