The Blame
Dun2Def
Choking Susan
Danger's Close
Bridge House 2, London
Saturday July 30 2011

Well, at least the neighbours aren't going to complain about the noise. The Bridge House 2 occupies a room above a garage, opposite a scrapyard, in an industrial area of East London for which the term 'post-apocalyptic wasteland' would be a humourous understatement.

The relentless process of gentrification currently sweeping through the East End hasn't got this far, obviously. And I suspect that's just the way tonight's bands like it.

Are we ready to punk it up? Hey ho, let's go.

Danger's Close have a name that sounds like it's lifted from a street map (Danger's Close...isn't that just round the corner from Hazardous Avenue?) and a thrashorama sound that stays on target no matter how fast they play. And Danger's Close play very fast indeed. The band's songs hurtle to their conclusions like a sucession of soapbox go-karts being pushed down a flight of stairs.

But Danger's Close aren't just a 100mph noise machine. The band's key asset is their feisty and energetic singer. She stomps and boogies in front of the band's slam-blam racket, giving us her hellfire holler of a vocal. The band throw in a cover of X-Ray Spex's 'Identity' and she matches Polystyrene's powerhouse howl note for note.

Vocalist Colleen Caffeine's bright orange wig lends an air of trashed glamour to Choking Susan. But then, given that the band come from Detroit, home of Iggy Pop and his silver trousers, Choking Susan have probably got trashed glamour in their bloodstreams. They've certainly got that Detroit-style laconic, low-slung, rock 'n' roll assault nailed. Bass and drums lock into a hammering rhyrhm. The guitarist, who looks like he should have a rat-look Harley parked outside, looms deadpan stage right, calmly peeling off the licks as if they were bananas.

It all kicks up into a ramalama racket. Colleen Caffeine trips the punk fantastic up front, all the while addressing us in a magnificent fuck-the-world drawl. She's got attitude a-go-go, but she makes a great glam diva, too, and her force of personality ensures she's always the focus in the centre of the noise-storm.

In fact, Colleen Caffeine is the reason Choking Susan could mix it outside the bounds of the punk scene, if they ever fancied it. I'd like to get the band alongside the likes of The Dogbones (no strangers to trashed glamour themselves, of course) and mix up the rock 'n' roll flavours a bit. Hey, I'd eat that soup.

Somehow you know what Dun2Def are going to do before they've hit the first note. The name drops a goofball calling card. We know we're not going to be in for any math rock with this lot, let's put it that way. Sure enough, Dun2Def deal in amiable bootboy anthems that make Sham 69 sound like the twittering of little birds.

They're a disparate bunch: fronted by a mohawked geezer who gives it a full-on don't-mess vocal shout, and yet on guitar they've got a younger chap who plays court jester, laughing it up at the expense of his bandmates. But that's the thing about Dun2Def. They might sound like a borstal breakout, but they're up for a larf along the way.

Their big anthem is 'Bargain Booze', a song about the joys of getting drunk on the cheap. It's a good old shoutalong number, and if there's a serious point in there somewhere - a treatise on the empty days of dole-queue Britain? - the band's boisterous humour wins out.

Now it's off to New York, in our band-by-band tour of the transatlantic punk landscape. The Blame are very keen to big up their city - their logo bills the band as 'The Blame NYC' as if Gotham itself is an integral part of the band's identity. Maybe it's the New York influence that makes The Blame more of an all-purpose hardcore racket packet rather than the more overtly generic punk punk band we might expect the UK punk scene to throw up. Nobody's got a mohawk in this band, at any rate. Why, two of 'em actually have long hair.

They've even got a song called 'New York City' just so we're in no doubt - it's an exhilarating collision of spiralling guitar and a staccato bam-bam-bam chorus that as near as dammit uses the three chanted words of the title as a percussion effect.

The Blame are heavily guitar-led, which might sound like an odd observation - if there's one thing all tonight's bands have in common, it's loud guitars. But The Blame shove their double-barelled guitar sound right to the front, making it massive and metallic without ever tipping over the edge into outright metal. The singer from Danger's Close jumps in for a vocal right at the end, and it all hits a climax in a flurry of overdriven six-string noise. That's the way to do it. And not a peep out of the neighbours, either.

The Blame: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Dun2Def: MySpace | Facebook

Choking Susan: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Danger's Close: MySpace | Facebook

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