Nemesis To Go - Live: Vertical Smile

Somewhere round the back of Hoxton, safely distant from the braying hoorays and premium lager-necking yuppies who now seem to plague this part of east London, there lurks a traditionally scruffy British boozer with a stripped-out interior, a vestigal stage, and a well stacked PA system. This encouragingly insalubrious watering hole is known to fans of creative noise (and its long-suffering neighbours) as the Macbeth. Tonight the pub plays host to a diverse crowd and an even more diverse range of artists, courtesy of the Decasian Records label, which itself grew out of the wayward creativity of the Decasia club.

Burlesque dancers warm things up with watering cans and tiger costumes, glittery high heels and inflatable paddling pools, and after the audience has been thus sprinkled and tantalised, it's time to bring on the bands.

The Spectrometers are two geeks with a distinct case of the Joe Meeks. A couple of besuited gents on vintage semi-acousic guitar and non-vintage laptop generate a wobbling, shuddering mass of outer-space sounds. There are no songs, as such: certainly no vocals. Just a selection of instrumentals which seem to have been plucked from the spaces between the planets. It's all ambience a-go-go - and, for the most part, fairly slo-mo. The Spectrometers aren't in the business of whipping up a dancefloor storm, that's for sure, and that's something that wrong-foots me for a moment. I keep expecting the band to launch into a twenty first century take on 'Telstar', or something equally punchy and dynamic, but every tune is a rumbling, bubbling sound-brew that never quite picks up the pace beyond a slow, dreamy, drift. The guitarist abandons his instrument for a set of maracas, and tapes a sparkler to one of them for additional glam factor, but this is a brief showbiz moment in a set that is otherwise entirely introspective and downtempo. And yet, that's OK. Once I've realised that interplanetary ambience is what it's all about, The Spectrometers' music of the spheres works rather well.

With magnificent disregard for the conventions of style, Billy Trivial is wearing a polka dot cravat with a paisley shirt. With equal disregard for the conventions of rock 'n' roll, he appears before us with nothing but his guitar and a shedload of reverb between himself and oblivion. He cranks his plank into a flurry of psychedelia and adds his spook-rock vocals to the billowing sonic blur, while stalking and lurching about the stage as if The Macbeth has slipped its moorings, sailed off into in mid-Atlantic, and the pub is now cresting a heavy ocean swell. The guitar sends technicolour chords cannoning off every flat surface, and the sound builds to fill the space like fog. Green fog, with monsters in it. Billy Trivial is a one man amalgam of Syd Barrett and Sid Vicious, Link Wray and The Jesus and Mary Chain. That's a fearsome combination of reference points, but somehow Billy Trivial manages to stir it all up and make his own strange brew from the ingredients. A psychedelic punk with John Cooper-Clarke's hairstyle, he has an uncanny way of putting on a one man show that's at once so eccentric, in a post-apocalyptic troubadour of the future manner, and at the same time so ripped-up and full-on that he almost convinces the audence that there's a band on stage with him, under a family size invisibility cloak. Crazy cravat, crazy barnet, crazy guy.

When I last saw I Am The Arm - ages ago now, in the wine cellar of doom known as Tesco Disco - the band came across as something of a project. Half way between mental and experimental, they kicked up a kind of electro-psychobilly racket, and while I rather enjoyed them, I got a distinct feeling that this was a band that was still too new to have nailed its chops. Now, however, it's clear that I Am

The Arm have been weilding the hammer. They've refined themselves into a scritching, skittering, rhythmic freak-outmachine, like The Fall would sound if you tipped a bucket of itching powder down their trousers. The band's music manages to be all over the place, splattering the room like a Jackson Pollock painting in sound. And yet, even as the music splatters, it's heading straight for the audience as if guided by wires, a strange mash-up of focus and scatter that surely shouldn't work - but it does. Shrieking and yelping, the vocalist, who seems to have mutated into Andy Warhol since last I saw him, wrenches the lyrics out of his guts and almost physically stuffs them down the microphone, as if it's down to his efforts to shove the words out of the PA speakers at the other end. Meanwhile, the keyboards fizz and swirl, and the rhythm rattles like gravel in a box. It's fast and scratchy and hangs together like tattered washing in a gale. I Am The Arm have discovered their muse, and boy, is she freaky.

The mood of the night is now wrenched in another direction, as the stage is cleared for the minimalist set-up of Eve Black/Eve White. If there was ever a band that bridged the gap between the Supremes and Suicide (and, let's face it, that's quite a chasm), here it is. The Eves conjure up soulful ghosts while maintaining a stern no-wave cool. Their songs are anthemic and yet full of space, exercises in electronic reductionism that nevertheless sound towering and assertive, and not for the first time I find myself wondering, how do they do that? Eve Black/Eve White are an enigma set to the thump and crack of a beat box, the stark scaffolding of the rhythm poking through the velvet drape of the vocals. Almost uncannily - for there are no crowd-pleasing rockin' antics on stage; Eve White (or is it Eve Black?) merely shifts from foot to foot occasionally - the audience's attention is captured and held, the forceful subtlety of the music doing the job. Half-formed faces flit over the band as the set unfolds, and although we know it's just a vintage movie being projected from the DJ booth, it almost seems that the band is conjuring spirits. In another life, this band might be a divatastic soul revue; in yet another maybe they'd be Kraftwerkinan electro-punks. In this life, they combine it all. Uncanny...and cool.

Were we talking about punk? Well, I believe the word was mentioned. Now I'm going to mention it again, for Vertical Smile embody the original spirit of punk - that dowhatchalike-and-do-it-with-attitude approach that unfortunately got crushed under an onslaught of generic Exploited-alikes. But if there's any crushing to be done here, it's care of the relentless, driving rhythms that push - no, shove - the Vertical Smile dragster up the strip. Now, I've seen this band before, and I know what's coming. But it's still an exhilarating kick to the head as the drums kick in and the bassline gleefully nails every beat to the floorboards. For those who've just joined us, that's Youth on bass - he who put the funk into Killing Joke's punk - so we expect a certain quality, and we duly get it. 'Shake It' sounds like someone went to a krautrock party and spiked the schwarzbier with speed; 'Explode!' packs enough of a punch to spill cocktails and mess hairstyles in the yuppie bars half a mile down the road. This is a bit of a supergroup version of Vertical Smile: the band's two guitarists, who usually take it in turns to appear, are both on stage tonight, and the resulting duelling turbocharge this gives to the sound is enough to rearrange furniture with sheer sonic force. There's a guest star, too. All of a suden, a bohemian figure grabs the vocal mic, his coat flapping, the light bouncing off his spectacles. What is this - an impromptu appearance by a passing mad professor? Well, almost. In fact, it's conceptual rocker Zodiac Mindwarp, ranting away in an entertainingly, er, conceptual fashion while the Vertical Smile sturm und drang hammers away behind him. Don't ask me what it's all about - he could be giving us an erudite dissertation on quantum mechanics or making up dirty limericks for all I know - but it's a gloriously surreal interlude and, somehow, it all hangs together, even when a full-scale stage invasion erupts, and the band brings things to a barely-controlled close in a crush of furiously grooving bodies. Dowhatchalike? I like it.

Essential links:

Vertical Smile: MySpace
Eve Black/Eve White: MySpace
I Am The Arm: MySpace
Billy Trivial: MySpace
The Spectrometers: MySpace

Decasian Records: MySpace
The Macbeth: MySpace

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