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Descending into the mysterious space under News From Nowhere, meeting place/venue/café Next to Nowhere was bathed in mood lighting replete with fairy lights strewn about the stage area.
Headliners Mashemon opened their account in the packed club with two bludgeoning tracks, highlighting their tougher, guitar driven edge.
Flanked by two projector screens beaming day-glo scenes from Girl on a Motorcycle and other footage, some random, some relevant, the band’s electro-glam stomp was in rude health.
Low Pressure System rumbled out of the speakers persuasively, mixing a Velvet Underground-style drone with a poppier edge.
Given extra swagger by Ronny’s guitar crunch, Lips, Limbs, Lungs and new track Guts pointed the way forwards for the group, the toughened up rock sound meshing seamlessly with the programmed beats and live drums.
The trio concluded the set with an encore of Sanity Check, backed by vintage footage of Pan’s People, dancing eerily in synch to the music some forty years after they were originally filmed.
Appearing midway through the evening, Mashemon bridged the divide between the electronica of Dass Unser and the post-punk of Das Beat.
Prior to the headliners, Dass Unser’s lyrical melancholy disco enveloped the room.
An exacting mixture of mid-period Depeche Mode and New Order guitar riffs with mournful Bernard Sumner vocals, the three-piece excelled at subtle, nuanced electronica.
Their best song was saved until last as Fallen, based around a classic Giorgio Moroder synth pulse, concluded their set on a highpoint.
Das Beat concluded proceedings, the quintet’s motorik beats and new wave/post-punk guitars were well matched by fuzzy Stranglers esque basslines and sneery Public Image Ltd vocals.
Describing themselves as a band who play ‘loud, fast, short music’ the summary proved to be less of a description and more of a mission statement.
Not entirely dissimilar to The Cribs to use a more recent reference point, the band’s songs didn’t so much as come to a conclusion as abruptly slam to a halt before launching into the next one.
The five-piece reached the apex of their allotted time with the buzzsaw riffs of the excellent They Don’t Make a Sound, a ditty that displayed their interlocking dual guitar format and spat out vocal melodies highly effectively.
Photos by Marie Hazelwood