大象传媒

When it comes to local gigs, it's often easy to overlook musical offerings from the South in favour of the veritable smorgasbord of Northern talent, so it's interesting to catch a glimpse of what's bubbling below the border for a change.

Opening up the evening is Daithi O'Dronai, a graduate from the first series of 'The All Ireland Talent Show', who comes armed with a fiddle and a laptop. Looping several fiddle riffs with drum samples and other percussive peculiarities, the young man from Co. Clare seems to have unearthed a rather novel take on experimental electronica. Sadly as the set goes on, it seems nothing more than trance music with an Irish folk gimmick, with every track sounding like a carbon copy of the last. The fact that the set consists of 'tracks' serves only to his detriment; the breaks in between each song impedes the momentum of the set greatly, reducing the initially enthused crowd to bashful whispers until the next track starts.

Up next is indie outfit The Ralphs. You know the drill by now: guitar work in the same vein as The Kooks and Vampire Weekend, fast paced drums, bright eyed odes to summertime hedonism and unrequited love. It's all executed with obvious competence, and received warmly by the audience, but it leaves a very slim impression; as one song track begins, it's almost impossible to remember how the previous song sounded. Not a hallmark for longevity.

An underwhelming performance of The Clash's 'White Riot' garners little ovation, and is certainly not in keeping with the overall tone of their set. All is forgiven however once math rock 5-piece Lost Chord arrive to the stage to deliver a set that can only be described as an aural waterboarding.

Even the untrained human ear has a limited capacity to endure guitars out of tune and out of synch: Lost Chord treat us to 20 minutes of them, accompanied by skull piercing synth, and a hideous vocal delivery from the implausible ringleader.

Their musical stance is nothing more than a baffling miscellany of tenuous, underdeveloped ideas, all clumsily nailed together in some semblance of order: While at one instance they mimic the same rhythmic stylings as Mew and ASIWYFA, the next minute things sound like 茂驴陆Funkytown' played in the 7th circle of Hell. In reality, there doesn't seem to be any discernable objective to the project except to torture any sentient being with a merciless barrage of vacuous noise. It looks like these boys have a lot of looking left to do to find that coveted chord.

It's up Go Panda Go to give the evening's proceedings much needed revitalization, which, thankfully, they achieve with ease. There's plenty going on here: bright guitars, polyrhythmic drumming and unique multi-layered vocals, yet everything is cleverly spaced out, without being invasive of each other. Recent single 'Whiplash' bears testament to that, and proves to be one of the main highlights of their set. Their impressive rendition of 'Get Innocuous!' by LCD Soundsystem is as ambitious a closer to a set as you're going to find, and it ends the night off on a positive tone.

No doubt, there's definitely something in the water down Mexico way...

Chris Johnson