Pissed Jeans @ Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, 12 Nov

Sunday evenings aren’t usually full of surprises. The normal expectation would be for a fair-to-decent local punk band on the rise to get a much relished support slot. Instead, Lone Taxidermist create the most ambitious, arresting, and bizarre performance you could see all year.

An uncertain amount of members spread across the stage and around the Brudenell, dressed in boiler suits and masks, with roles varying from blasting out heady, technicolour electronica, to covering members of the crowd with whipped cream. The collective are fronted by Natalie Sharp in an Oops-era Britney red vinyl catsuit, adorned with about fifty yellow blown-up rubber gloves. Sharp's heavily processed vocal combines the erotic with the emotional (“erotional”, so she’s coined). She converses with Siri in a thick Yorkshire accent, and ends the set crowd surfing in her underwear over a giant plastic sheet, under which about thirty of the audience appear to be tied up.

All of which is enhanced by a projected backdrop of lurid lights and disassociated images, including cakes being squashed between faces and naked backsides painted cranberry red. If all this sounds like a dizzying sensory overload, that’s because it is.

Pissed Jeans have never had the air of a band that takes themselves at all seriously, and rather than a carefully choreographed dramatic entrance, frontman Matt Korvette seems happy to make up nonsense lyrics to the cock-rock still playing while his bandmates turn up and kick into Ignorecam. Despite having the surface appearance of being profoundly unsophisticated, their impact is down to a subtle poise, whip-smart sense of humour and a solid, driving rhythm section that allows Korvette and guitarist Bradley Fry messy, chaotic free rein.

Racing along with such pace that the heavy, grimy Bathroom Laughter threatens to trip over itself, the crowd is suitably invigorated; although for one attendee, perhaps too much. Korvette’s devastating sarcastic takedown of the tough guy’s two attempts at stage-diving are appropriately followed by The Bar is Low, wherein Pissed Jeans rail against the appalling amount of slack men are given, simply by virtue of being men.

Though the brutality and harshness of hardcore punk has historically raged against capitalism, the police, and various other incarnations of "the man", it’s rarely been used so effectively to reflect on the anxieties and ridiculousness of actually being a man. Pissed Jeans do so impressively, whether it's on the carnal Love Without Emotion, or tearing through general male shittiness on Romanticize Me.

Returning to the stage for a sweaty, swaggering yell-along run through of False Jesii Part 2, and a bleakly tongue-in-cheek cover of Guns N' Roses’ It’s So Easy, Pissed Jeans expertly tread the fine line between mucking about and teaching us the serious lesson on how having this much fun can be good for you.