Restless Natives: Future of the Left @ St Luke's, 14 May

It’s a sparse crowd that greets last-minute addition Chrissy Barnacle, but those lucky early revellers are treated to something pretty special. Her offbeat but thoroughly bewitching songs are an absolute treat; dark yet delicate, twisting like brambles between fractured, fingerpicked folk and stories which soar through the St Luke’s rafters.

Through no fault of their own, fellow hometown heroes United Fruit don’t fare quite so well. A muddy mix means that many of the finer textures from new record Eternal Return are buried in a sea of echo, making it difficult to pick out the tuneful alt. rock that drives the likes of Ghost Inside Your Head and Where The Sun Beats Down. Instead, fortune favours the spikier, more rhythmically dynamic elements of their oeuvre, and the front few rows show some love by duly bouncing along.

No such problems affect Rolo Tomassi; their set is almost heroically perfect. It’s not like they’re the only band out there meshing all-guns-blazing hardcore with bursts of anthemic beauty, but the way they do so offers a singular synaptic shock, jarring and pummelling even as it sends euphoric shivers shooting down the spine.

Highlights from last year’s Grievances LP make up the majority of the set, and whether teasing us with the soft chords of Prelude III (Phantoms) or simply raging with the full-pelt assault of Stage Knives, it’s impossible not to find yourself carried away by the perfectly measured waves of sound; the calm and the storm. By the time they wheel out a mighty All That Has Gone Before, with its gentle piano-led mid-section flowing into deft yet muscular blastbeats before exploding into cacophonous melody, the room is well and truly theirs.

You’d pity any band that had to follow them, if only that band didn’t happen to be Future of the Left. Picking up the gauntlet laid down by Rolo Tomassi’s astonishing mess of scintillating contradictions, they plough into a devastating set of riff-heavy noise-rock delivered with a typically gleeful sense of menace. Frontman Falco is on great form, lambasting a malfunctioning keyboard (“It’s a racist piece of shit”) and snarling the likes of Miner’s Gruel and The Limits of Battleships like a man possessed.

Old fans get a treat too: a handful of Mclusky classics are dusted off (notably Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues and a squalling, sensational To Hell With Good Intentions) while Robocop 4 - Fuck Off Robocop unites the crowd in laughter and head-spinning riffola. If you’ve heard latest offering The Peace and Truce of..., you’ll probably already have an idea, but let’s summarise just in case: furious, funny and fun as fuck.