Credit: soundisbeauty.com

14 September 2006
The Buffalo Bar, Highbury

People are queuing round the corner over an hour before the doors open. Now that might be nothing special for whoever-u-jour’s solo Astoria date, but for an unsigned band playing in a pub basement, this is something to sit up, take note, and barge your way in so you get a good spot down at the front.

No-one’s under any illusions here; tonight the support bands might as well be a couple of guys playing a comb-kazoo and a couple of spoons, so little is the interest in them. Tonight is about a 5-piece Brighton who can genuinely claim to be peerless, both in the sense that no-one is doing anything close to their sound, and that no-one would even come close if they tried. Tonight belongs to the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.

“Mister Mental” is Elvis reborn through voodoo spells and forced through a Satanic assault course. Guy McKnight leads his gang like they’re single-handedly planning on inducing hallucinations through manipulation of the audience’s eardrums. And judging by the frenzy erupting in a venue smaller than your living room, they’re nine tenths of the way there.

How The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster have inspired such loyalty is by producing the kind of schizoid blues-rumble that the cool kids love and the uncool kids love twice as hard. Currently label-less following Island’s unceremonious dumping of them in late 2005 – poor sales of their two albums being the whispered reason – it’s almost beyond comprehension that this band aren’t being fettered by every label going when you hear the band unleash the bug-eyed midnight shuffle of  “Psychosis Safari”.

“Celebrate Your Mother” is still the MILF-worshipping, surf-punk gone-so-wrong-it’s-right slammer that brought them into the public-mindset, and it’s still enough to bring the Buffalo to a near-frenzy. Couple that with a song like “Chicken” – the musical equivalent of Quasimodo swinging from your kitchen lightbulb and screaming for bloody vengeance – and you’ve got the best damn live sets you could ever hope to have carved into your brain with a sonic-equivalent of a rusty Stanley knife.