The Jimmy Cake; Paul O'Reilly & Steve Fanagan

Who’d have imagined it possible: an acoustic act who make David Kitt sound too (whisper it) obvious? But Paul O'Reilly and Steve Fanagan (the former murmuring shyly over drifting watercolour reveries, shifting from foot to foot like an awkward preteen Nick Drake; the latter supplying gentle counterpoint in the form of pings and squeaking string noises like faraway seagulls) are, charmingly, unafraid to explore moments even smaller and less easily located than Kittser’s. And if sometimes their not-quite-Papa M-ish attempts to utilise poignant repetition mean that monotony, rather than quiet, is the new loud… well, there’s certainly enough evidence here that it’s a risk worth taking.

There is something strangely cool about watching a man play a bicycle bell without so much as a trace-element of irony. But lest you think this is a display of coy aren’t-we-cute eccentricity, The Jimmy Cake – a seated, smiling cacophony of trumpet, saxophone, squeezebox, and endless random percussion (think: attic, toy store, bike shed, rubbish tip) - are here to clarify that, in fact, fucking LOUD is the new loud.

With the busy, wordless complexity and hyperintelligent precision of Daniel Figgis, and more Big Modernist Ideas than a labelful of post-rock records, the Jimmy Cake conjure the kind of queer pathos and creepy black-comic humanity you’d be more likely to locate in a Coen Brothers film than in Whelans of a Saturday. Harmonies bloom upward from amongst the crisscrossing basslines, shivering sleighbells, clattering drums and the accordion’s heavy breathing, revealing themselves gloriously over time, making us wait for it – and we do, transfixed. You could call it post-rock, but it’s way too melodic, too un-self-conscious and too ambitious, for that. And anyway, never mind the ‘post.’ They ROCK.

Go see.