These Monsters 
Lexington, London
19/02/2010

They’re bringing saxy back. Yeah! And all those punters won’t know how to act… Oh, alright then, perhaps they will, and it’ll involve squealing like meerkats on mescaline every time Johnny Farrell launches into another passage of sideways skwronking. And when he’s not busy doing that he’s being all mercurial on the Moog with a potent presence that threatens to make him this generation’s Nick Rhodes/Neil Codling/Alice Hadouken! – delete according to your own age, readers, but all clearly fine role models, eh? With someone pulling that much astounding double duty, you could almost forgive the rest of the band for taking it fairly easy throughout.

“Easy”, however, doesn’t appear to be in These Monsters’ vocabularies. Instead, brain-breaking complexity, a granite-ingrained hardness that borders on the gargantuan, and the steely exuberance of the Digital Hardcore hordes would seem to be the order of the day. Sam Pryor – first out of the entirely-understandable shirtlessness traps this evening – doesn’t so much sing as channel all sorts of arcane abstractness into an inarticulate approximation of undetermined unspeakable, while applying equal amounts of virtuosity and violence to his guitar. Ian Thirkill sees those confrontational timing games and raises them all the further with bass barrages that meander with a breathtaking murk and malevolence. And Uri Geller-a-like Tommy Davidson acts as a militarily intense lightning rod for proceedings; his utterly gratuitous drummed upping of the fury ante making every note all the sweatier.

Hits, of course, are few and far between – you could probably just about have a bit of a dance to the lethally low-strung ‘Harry Patton’, while the thoroughly traumatised ‘Call Me Dragon’ marks itself out as virtually a signature song. But this is very much avant-rock done absolutely right, and that makes These Monsters the most fearsome of foursomes…

Iain Moffat