Hookworms / Base Ventura @ Soup Kitchen, Manchester, 5 April

You’d be hard-pushed to find a soul yet to extoll the virtues of Hookworms’ debut album Pearl Mystic. You’d also be hard-pushed to find a way into their headline Manchester gig: and if you've managed it and are down the front, you'll probably have just been pushed. Hard.

Before Hookworms, however, are Base Ventura, in all their punderful glory, are fittingly psychedelic – to a lesser degree than Hookworms’ complete conscience-melt, mind, but you can have too much of a good thing. They play unabashedly contorted rock, quite possibly with a flavour of musical performance-enhancers. Their set crescendoes into an inexplicable, feverish sea of noise.

By name, Hookworms are meant to dwell in the grimmest, most claustrophobic of cavities. Logically, then, they thrive here in the Soup Kitchen: an over-inhabited, under-ventilated basement. Equally, they’ve driven themselves into a bit of a hole with regards to that ‘psychedelic’ title: use of this omnipresent adjective shows no sign of disappearing. To combat this, it seems, they’ve decided to call everyone’s bluff with a live show so distortedly monumental it leaves the word redundant.

That said, with Pearl Mystic as the set’s source text, it would be hard to fluff it up. Away/Towards and In Our Time are theses on how to shape droning swathes of discord into something clever, and in the flesh, it’s all the more impressive. As they're a deliberately withdrawn band, it seems futile to try to speculate on the whys and wherefores of Hookworms’ collective state of mind; but by the sounds of things, their minds are brilliantly – mercifully – warped.