Saturday 28/10/06 The Second Floor, The Dodgems, Lyons & Tigers @ In The City, Manchester

Where better to take refuge on this stereotypically damp Manchester night than the Dry Bar? Poor puns apart, there are plenty of reasons to duck into the Oldham Street haunt tonight, not least the appearance of Liverpool’s Lyons & Tigers who are currently causing a few industry waves with their infectious brand of whatever the **** it is they do. The faux-caberet/funk/cheese/??? (I give up) trio are wasted on such an early billing, but that doesn’t stop a near-naked Dave Lyons dry-humping a female photographer on ‘Tight Pants’ or a stupid grin spreading across our collective face as they rattle through Rob Da Bank’s fave ‘I’m a Monkey’.

Next up, Duke Riots blast out spacey funk metal like Rage Against The Machine wired-up to Muse’s NASA-endorsed effects rack, but Dead Dead Dead! fail to impress with a sound that bristles with malicious, gothic intent but lacks any kind of melodic hook. 

Cranking up the Marshalls to ear-bleed level, The Dodgems leave us bruised, battered and deafened. The Poptones four-piece race through an intense, bluesy punk set that brings to mind The Von Blondies or a speed-balling White Stripes. Half an hour of monitor-heeling solos, speaker-diving shapes and sheer brute power later, we’re more than willing to forgive the Sheffield lads for the couple of grimly trad tracks that punctuate proceedings.

From there, it’s back across the Pennines to the North West for The Second Floor. Droning, howling and hypnotic, the black-clad quartet take us from the fairground of the last band to their own kind of psychedelic netherworld. Obvious points of reference are BRMC, Spiritualized and even Lou Reed (check Nolan Watkinson’s smacked-out drawl) – and what sets them apart from the rest of the so-called nu-gazing crowd may not yet be clear. But without doubt, theirs is a dark place well worthy of further investigation.

Of the remainder, Brigade blast through a hair-shaking rock set straddling a line between Amusement Parks On Fire and Placebo, a Paris Motel-augmented Circulus run flawlessly through a prog-folk set which does nothing that hasn’t been done decades ago by Roy Harper, Pentangle or The Incredible String Band, while local favourites The Children show why they’ve been handpicked by the Modfather himself as his support act next month. Make of that what you will.

A mixed bag, then, at the Dry Bar tonight. We try in vain to get in next door to see The Noisettes at the Night and Day Café, so with tail and ITC Delegate pass between legs, we amble home with the sounds of Mancunian white noise, Liverpudlian sex music and, erm, Sheffieldian(?) feedback ringing in our ears. And, tomorrow, we’ll do it all over again.