Show: Shudder Pulps, Tense Men, Fair Ohs at The Stags Head

It'd been a good few weeks (or maybe even months) since I'd gone local to a show, and the Fair Ohs single launch at the Stags Head looked set to be unmissable, with a line up featuring two very new bands that have taken shape with roots laid between Brighton and London.

For once, I actually took some photos. And then lost my phone. So pictures nicked from their webpages will (once again), have to do...

The first to bridge the Brighton-London divide was the excellent Shudder Pulps; three guys piecing together a mix of ramshackle post-punk/experimental learnings, broken up with poppier tunes with stand-out choruses and the like. It's very much the jigsawed sounds of a band trying things out and seeing where things lead them, and their set was a lot of fun to watch (albeit from the back of the room behind a lot of very tall men, so it took about ten mins to work out where the vocals were coming from!). They also have a rather nice 6-track cassette out, which I think you can get direct from them or pick up from future shows – highly recommended listening.

The London-Brighton theme then continued with Tense Men, who I'd been hoping to see live for a while now, made up of members of Cold Pumas and Sauna Youth (credited as Righteous James Phoenix and Overland Fisher on their debut tape). And the wait was certainly worth it – between just the two of them, their guitar loops, echoing vocals and incessant drumming felt like a fight for survival rather than yr usual pub set, sweeping up any stray thought or minor distraction into a trance-like state. Sometimes these things work best live, but away from the stage, their self-titled cassette still perpetuates all of the energy and spirit of a show. You can listen to tracks and find out more here.

Tense Men live

And I didn't see their whole set, but from what I did catch Dalston fixtures Fair Ohs were as potty-mouthed and entertaining as ever, packing out the entire room and inciting a lot of dancing and heckles in equal measure. Listen and learn more here.

http://shudderpulps.tumblr.com/

http://tensemen.tumblr.com/

http://fairohs.com/

Band: Tense Men

Tense Men is the new project of Sauna Youth frontman Rich and Cold Pumas' guitarist/vocalist Ollie.

They've just started up a Tumblr with a few introductory tracks (titled 'A Gruesome Discovery', 'Tubular Swells' and 'Dawn Tourists'), all three looped, claustrophobic surges of brittle guitar and shocked drum beats that stack up to create a sound a lot larger than the sum of its parts. Very little is known about this new venture (just look what the Internet threw up on a chance Google attempt) but it looks set to be something very special indeed.