These New Puritans @ The Do Club, Brighton - February 2007

Hammering and hissing away like the frenzied engine room of a phantom ship submerged in tonight's treacherous Brighton gusts and gales, These New Puritans and their warped technology could be in no more apt surroundings than the cramp and squalor of the basement we find ourselves shuffling about in.

A band not content to merely stand up a cardboard cut out of aesthetic, or rather – rely on it to stand them up, as some of their contemporaries are often guilty of, These New Puritans are the epicentre around which a dark, psychedelic dimension erupts and boils over. They are the blood-shot eye of a psychotic storm.

Framed manically in erratic bursts of violent light, Jack Barnett and co are a transfixing robotic hybrid of cold, chiselled beats and electronics and eerily inescapable melody, coming on like the soaring spirit of a little lost Victorian factory hand drowned out amidst a coal blackened blue murder of whirling mechanics and grinding industrial percussion.

Subscribing to the ‘less is more' philosophy in terms of performance, the band is largely subdued throughout, save the disturbed animation of Jack; all involuntary contortions and fearful eyes as he declares ‘we're being watched by experts' with ominous paranoia. In fact, it is ‘Elvis,' the song which that line twitches uncomfortably within that is the set highlight with it's repetitive homage to ‘the king' buzz-sawed in half by roaring sheets of metallic guitar, leaving the gurning throng in the frontline to dodge the errant sparks and static.

These New Puritans are the place where art and machinery collide and whilst it may not be a brave new world, it is certainly a brilliant racket.

Jack Shankly