Caught Live: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead + Rival Schools + Asobi Seksu @ Electric Ballroom, London

Asobi Seksu’s lengthy journey across The Atlantic from New York City makes their ludicrous 6:40pm stage time more of a slap in the face than a welcome to the capital. A crowd that starts off numbering in the low double figures luckily begins to swell as handfuls of punters begin slowly pouring in to the dark cavern of The Ballroom from the sun-warmed Camden pavement outside.

To their credit, and despite the early hour/lack of visible support, The Seksu seem content to plough on regardless, and when vocalist Yuki Chikudate momentarily trips over the kickdrum she wears an expression of stoic inevitability that perfectly matches the circumstance. Drawing mostly on the bright, shimmering drone pop of Fluorescence, their Cocteau Twins-infused charmer of a recent fifth album, the band struggle against the odds to deliver a brief, breezy, fuzz-bathed guitar-wash of a set. A lovely start to the evening.

Rival Schools have cultivated a legend based largely on the bands their members were once a part of (Youth of Today, Quicksand etc.) and the fact that the band split when on the brink of becoming The Next Nirvana ©. Tonight they are greeted as returning kings, and material from their ten-years-in-the-making sophomore album Pedals is received every bit as warmly as proto-emo classics like ‘Good Things’ and triumphal set-closer ‘Used for Glue’. The thronging sell-out crowd seemingly know every word to every song, allowing vocalist Walter Schreifels to step away from the mic and enjoy the moment from time to time. The only real false note is a clearly-staged meander through the opening verses of Bon Jovi’s ‘Dead or Alive’ – it’s funny, sure, but very obviously planned and milked for more than its worth. That Rival Schools have returned after such a lengthy hiatus with a wealth of quality material and a still-rabid fanbase is testament to both the band themselves and the hardy followers of their sound.

As the air inside the by-now-overfilled room becomes less and less breathable, we are treated to the musical apocalypse that is, and always will be, our headliner, Texan post-hardcore stalwarts …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. They're a band who've been pulling the same moves and stretching against the walls of the same sounds for well over a decade now, but their regular deviations towards mediocrity on record are easy to overlook when presented with their ever-fierce meltdown of a live set. Eschewing explosive crowd-pleasers like ‘Rest Will Follow’, ‘Mistakes and Regrets’ and ‘Weight of The Sun’ (the fearsome centre-piece of recent seventh studio LP, Tao of The Dead), the veteran four-piece instead tonight rely on a parallel musical history of the band; this means we’re guided through the harder, dirtier and more winding backstreets of prog, punk and experimentia in which ...AYWKUBTTOD are every bit as proficient.

Unsurprisingly, then, the set remains pitch-black in tone throughout, occasionally wavering into night-dark slyly-grinned humour, and sometimes devolving into basic, bludgeoning riffola. ‘Caterwaul’ and ‘Relative Ways’ prove to be the crowd favourites here this evening, and by the time we’re turfed out of the battered venue, ears savaged and baffled by the hour once more (incredibly, all three bands are offstage by 9:45pm!), all and sundry are left with the feeling of having witnessed the closest thing underground rock music has to a ‘heritage band’ (hey, listen to that 'Stones riff on Tao...-opener 'Pure Radio Cosplay') and a show that would have worked a whole lot better as an experience had it not been for the money-hungry curfew-enforcing tendencies of the venue's owners.

(photo courtesy of Sharpie.)