Bear Essentials

The venue is stuffed, industry types crammed in shoulder to shoulder with scruffy, long-haired punters. Naturally the sweat factor is high.

Jam Jar Jail open the night with four songs. Their music has always seemed tantalisingly noisy, but kind of blurred and directionless to me. But tonight their last two songs show people like me how wrong we can be. Vibrant, hard, driving and focussed, if these are JJJ's true colours, things bode well.

Wormhole, who got this gig by dint of a demo sent to Wiiija boss Gary, can be prone to some meandering (witness the latter part of 'Wavelength' which only ends when the doughboy guitarist has succeeded in breaking all his strings). However, there is a freshness and life to their sound that is so often lacking in buzzing punk-pop.

Time for the British contingent, and I'm afraid that Blood Sausage, including two members of Huggy Bear (Jo and Nikki) in their line-up, are absolutely woeful. Slack, dull, sub-standard bar-room blues - who needs it?

Huggy Bear are one of the most written-about and discussed bands of the last twelve months. Manifestos and music, the treatment of women at gigs, the role of musicianship in a band - they have kick-started more debates than they have actually written songs. That aside (and 'politics' only makes a vague appearance during the gig tonight) are they worth spending £3.50 to watch?

And the answer has to be a resounding YES! On tonight's performance (without Jon, who doesn't travel) Huggy Bear are one of the most exciting live prospects for a long time. This is punk rock, imbued with a sense of the '90s that fends off any 'retro' criticisms.

Skip to the encore and you get a perfect distillation of what justifies the Huggy Hype of the past year. 'Teen Tighterns' from the new EP and 'Carnt Kiss' (from the Kiss Curl EP) are visceral blasts of socio-political angst that burn the hairs from the inside of your nose and provoke that bubbling-up of adrenaline that leaves you confounded.

Huggy Bear may be obnoxious (sometimes), they may be too 'politically correct' to turn into anything other than caricatures of themselves, and they are certainly not the finest ever exponents of technical expertise. But when all's said and done, they write searing tunes that kick a whole swathe of 'top indie bands' into touch.

The night belongs to Huggy Bear, and deservedly so. Fuck the begrudgers!

• Dan Oggly