The Uptown Racquet Club (Music For Visuals By Donal Dineen) at Wonky 2

To be blunt, there are an awful lot of wordless ‘instrumental’ bands in this town at the moment. To someone who longs for the irresistible tug of a melody line to lead our ear, or for sung words that transform the known universe into fierce and casual pop-poetry, or – most of all – to someone who craves the atavistic thrill of the sound of the human voice, such a surfeit of lyric-free, melody-unreliant music, whether based in guitar or laptop, can begin to feel a bit, well, what’s-the-pointish: temporarily fascinating, but fundamentally unnecessary to one’s happier living. Yes, this is a personal, and thus non-representative and (thus again) more than slightly unfair view; yes, this discounts the groundswell of fierce devotion instrumental bands have inspired of late in the capital - not least The Redneck Manifesto, for the love of whom, it is not an exaggeration to say, promoter Leagues O’Toole first devised Wonky. And yes, it’s a point of view easily discounted when you think of people who have done instrumentalism right: in this country alone, to name but two, we’ve Daniel Figgis and the astonishingly realised sub-universe that was Skipper; and the creepy, charming, earsplitting cacophony that is The Jimmy Cake, progenitors of last year’s weird and majestic Brains. This year’s genre-redeemers, then, here to re-prove that words are for losers who can’t say it with music, are the pathos-laden, relentless, positively monumental The Uptown Racquet Club.

It’s no accident that Donal Dineen has hooked up with the URC – and his film, for which they’ve written this music, flickers alongside them as they play. It’s of a train journey at dusk, all l’heure bleue skies and telegraph poles in profile; and we see it twice, the film’s mirror-twin duplicated to its left so that image blossoms outward from image between the two. A train journey: how perfect, because the Racquet Club combine the pleasantly harsh, repetitive clang of machinery with the distilled, wordless overemotionalism – an almost-nostalgia for your experience as you experience it – of a train journey spent silently windowgazing at a darkening countryside. The Racquet Club are a foursome, three of whom play guitars – two providing aggressive, interlocked aural asymmetries, the third sending pings of moony, almost ghostly melodies scudding skyward. The fourth Club member, as it happens, is fearsomely hardcore Jimmy Cake drummer John Dermody. And that’s all there is to them. So simple: and yet only the heart-wringing apocalypse-squall of Godspeed You Black Emperor! can better them for wordless but massive emotional impact, for saying nothing and telling us everything. They are this year’s proof that you don’t ‘need’ lyrics and voices in order to provide a transformative musical experience. You just have to be brilliant.

Miss them at your peril.