Three Trapped Tigers
ICA, London
28/04/2010

When ¡Forward Russia! used numbers instead of names for their tunes, it concealed the dynamite cocktail of pretension and erudition that lay within; by way of contrast, when Three Trapped Tigers go for figures rather than titles, it comes across as a rather more pragmatic way of identifying tracks whose lyrics, more often than not, extend to “yaaah!”, “waaah!”, and, perhaps inevitably, “raaah!”. Fantastically, however, thanks to the spellbinding synchronisity of their expanding oeuvre and their expert timing, they do, right now, officially go up to eleven. Some would argue that they always did… 

They’re slightly scuppered, mind you, by a temporary guitar trauma that leaves bashedly dapper frontman Tom a trifle tongue-tied, but, once out of the woods, they go along their merry way remarkably. Well, we say merry… perhaps that’s not quite the right way to describe Squarepusher-style scrapings and a Battles-esque war on rhythm, but it’s certainly a large-scale delight. Not that it’s all as brutal as that might sound – ’6′ in particular is a lovely little beast, almost Olympian in its tinkling and blessed with a regal bearing that flourishes even amid Adam’s deliciously rushing syncopation – but when they really unsheath their claws they do so with devastating force and purpose. For instance, the aforementioned ’11′, home to some stellar guitar sculpturing from Matt, is a crunchy and increasingly lost cyclonic whirl through long-deserted post-rock territory, its companion on the recently-released third EP (named exactly what you think it is) ’10′ takes a more amelodic approach, forcing much of Warp’s wonderful late-90s output through an especially industrial mincer, and ’3′ is a genuinely colossal early highlight, haring around the walls like a propane-powered squash ball and spraying corrosive luminous acid everywhere it goes. Men of few words they might be, but you can’t accuse them of not earning their stripes…

Iain Moffat