Anyone wanting to know what would happen if a band soundchecked halfway through their set should get their DeLorean up to 88mph and aim for about 8.30pm tonight. First few Failed NASA Experiment songs: hairy man with acoustic guitar bowing and looping his instrument, tapping microphones on drums, and generally making a great Six Organs Of Admittance-style noise. A 10 minute intermission while a full band clamber onstage, set up drumkits, fix axes, then the last few Failed NASA Experiment songs: gnarly, building takes around central guitar lines, layers looped, drums rising. Featuring a couple of Fredrick Stanley Star members, FNE make a fine racket, for what is possibly their first gig, and promise a lot more.

Someone told me Picture Books In Winter were post rock, someone else twee. Inevitably they’re neither and I need to get new friends. Can’t muck around. PBIW have more of a scattershot rock thing going on, moving from brooding to frenetic, driven by call and response vocals and permanent stage-left violin. It’s clattering, fidgety and sporadically entertaining, held together by the singer’s electroshock focal point. They do have a very good third song though. Bands! Always have a very good third song.

Two men and a woman are onstage. One of the men is called Rusty: he’s touched Panda Bear. There’s also a man in a smock, possibly Rusty, kneeling on a cushion, playing drums. From this collision of hipster and hippy comes The Present. Any fools coming for hot Animal Collective will be only half-satisfied: The Present’s first song seems designed to glare in an opposite, noise-soaked direction. There’s a fair amount of din in the New York band’s short set, as keyboard, drums and guitar get mangled through effects pedals and twiddled knobs, but it’s met by waves of warmer fuzz, knotty improv psych that approaches a weird kind of pop in places. More great deranged campfire hollering from the US then, curtailed by Clwb’s onrushing club night, which features a fizzy sweet stall. Combine the two and blast off.

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