Credit: Found On Internet

The lights have come up by mistake, and for a painful 30 seconds or so, everyone is forced to look around and see each other. We’d all been safely shrouded in darkness, content to be absorbed in the music of Nelson, the band performing onstage. When the theatre at the ICA lights up, the look of guilt you can see on everyone’s face is like they’ve just been caught by their mother while knocking one off over some porn they found in a hedge.

That’s because we’d all got so rapt by ‘The Over Song’, we’d committed the cardinal sin among cooler-than-thou London crowds, and actually gone and gotten in to the music of a band we didn’t know. Unmistakably French – there’s something indescribably Gallic about them - the band manage to merge some subtle electrics with some monstrously huge sounding guitars, without anything being lost in the mix. It’s as if David Byrne has got up to jam with Josh Homme.

We were here at the ICA for Stage Of The Art, a foreign exchange of bands between art centres in London and Paris. While we hawk over Neon Neon and The Kills, we get to sample the art-rock electro of Nelson and the act that followed them on stage: Zombie Zombie.

At first, Zombie Zombie feel like the Parisian equivalent of Fuck Buttons. They both thunder out steamroller-sized hulks of electronic beats mashed with everything from the poppiest of hooks to the most barren white noise. Keyboardist Etienne Jaumet looks like Friar Tuck if he’d gone off to join Kraftwerk instead of Robin Hood, hiding behind a monastic bowl cut as his cohort, ‘Cosmic Neman’ batters out a beat of rollicking fills on a drum kit. Hidden behind a mammoth pair of shades, Neman looks a bit like that creepy guy who kind of is friends with someone you vaguely know who sometimes hangs out down the pub, only this time he’s sampling the feedback of a Dictaphone he keeps rewinding into a mic stand.

Zombie Zombie wind both themselves and the audience so tightly with their unending assault that it becomes an oddly exhausting spectacle to watch them. Like Satan second-jobbing as a milk man, something that should be mundane through over-familiarity is instead rendered extraordinary by those executing it.