Here she comes, all foxified up in green heels and a red dress so tight you can almost guess her phase of the moon. It’s Polly Jean, pelvic thrusting her way through ‘Who The Fuck’, mob handed with a band that look and sound like some Dr Moreau attempt at cross-breeding The Fall, The Birthday Party and Bo Diddley.
Stylistically and geographically located left of centre, Rob Ellis redefines his drumming role as a mathematic exercise in seeing how many prime factors you can delete from the rhythm equation and still answer the question of what time is it.
There’s a six-foot plus colossus of a bass player who looks like a scum-punk refugee from Mad Max II but plays with rather more sensitivity than the cut of his jib suggests. And there’s Bicycle Thief/John Frusciante/Vincent Gallo guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, a ringer for Rowland S Howard, and a wonderfully limber and loose player who still manages to flit from No Wave (‘Taut’) to anti-folk (‘Pocket Knife’) to maxed out blues (‘Meet Ze Monsta’), as well as doubling up on drums.
Put it down to la luna in her full term, or this being the first show after a brief lay off, but tonight was a less slick, more bolshy show than Oxegen. The band look like a band as distinct from an aggregation of sessioneers, but their specialist skills mean PJ gets to cherry pick from the lost Louse Point gospel and Is This Desire? (the fabulous ‘A Perfect Day Elise’ with its gorgeous noir snapshot of “the water soaked her blonde hair black”) as well as ‘Good Fortune’, ‘The Letter’ and ‘Down By The Water’. The result is a real body electric: flesh of guitar, blood of bass, bone of drum and banshee shriek.
Come last orders she leaves us with ‘To Bring You My Love’ – a song so suffused with evil it sounds like she stole it from an Inca burial ground – and we’re feeling a little bit more out of our heads and in our bodies than we did 90 minutes before.