Thursday 16/03/06 Shmoo, Nephew @ Night and Day, Manchester

Nephew are a surprise delight- a five piece band who create intensely dramatic meta-rock with bursts of noise punctuating starker poignant moments. Utililising guitar, bass, keyboard, drums and mandolin and violin (which is multitracked and looped, allowing for a broad palette of sound), these aren’t straightforward narratives, throwing the audience with songs mutating midway into different shapes. It’s a marvellous set but the closing ‘Climbing Ice’ is particularly enormous, moving through howls of echo with warped and distorted violin and stun-gun bass. Nephew release their debut single very soon and we’ll be hearing a lot more of them. Watch this space.

After taking to the stage, Chanteuse of Shmoo, Rowena, surprisingly announces that she is an idiot but, after what unfolds over the next half hour, she and the rest of this truly fantastic outfit prove definitively otherwise. These may well be the best four walls in Manchester but Shmoo already belong behind a TV screen on that music programme whose presenters are so young now as to be practically embryonic. They’re are a slippery beast- transcending the roll call of electronic acts they’re compared to (Daft Punk, Air, Goldfrapp etc). Part of this is down to the soulful vocals, rerouting the band into a different space where Acid Jazz was a) actually good and b) designed by Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation. Also, Shmoo are very much a BAND, proving that electronic music does not need to be studio bound. Behind banks of Moogs, super-funky bass, a drummer playing electronic pads and ‘real’ (apologies) drums, their outer space soul-disco transmits all the rushes that the best drugs can buy. The “trip hop treat” of “Playing God” implores that “technology cannot save you” but seems to be doing a pretty good job of it here. ‘Amnesia’ is just such am incredible bodyrush overload of noise, squiggles and melody as to be indescribable and they finish with ‘She Machine’ the sci-fi classic that is the AA side of their debut single which rocks like a mother****er. The lights go up, we’re back on earth and gutted. I’m with the idiots.