Playlouder - Music is the Network

“This one goes out to my pagan upbringing in Southern Ohio!”

Shouts Adam Elliot from Times New Viking, hammering into his drums as the band carve out another frazzled lo-fi noise-pop nugget. It’s the first night of the Shred Yr (Fucking) Face tour, wherein two American bands and one Welsh travel the country dispensing their unique brands of what used to be called indie.

TNV are first on, and as they get their instruments ready seem slightly nervous. As Adam says, he’s about to play the first note of the first song on the first tour. The crowd is already pretty big- it’s not about support acts tonight, but three individual (and much-hyped in certain quarters) bands worth seeing in their own right.

On record the trio are super white noisy, deliberately grainy and a mess of good time pop hooks. Live - while they’re still endearingly haphazard - it’s the songs themselves that jump out at you. The anthemic technicolour fuzz of single My Head rips through the speakers with unlikely clarity, guitarist Jared Phillips effortlessly emitting slack-but-tech riffs while his bandmates pound drums and twiddle a tiny electric organ.

Part of the appeal are the careless dual vocals, with both Adam and keyboardist Beth Murphy (in front of whose keyboard the majority of the men in the audience waited before the band came on) shouting out choruses like “I need more money ‘cos I need more drugs” over the noise. The set doesn’t quite ignite - first night jitters and being the first band on probably being the cause – but they're still ace and well worth catching. Keep a look out for these hippies in alt-rock clothing.

No Age are next, a duo from California on Sub Pop who like to say the word “fuck”. One plays the drums, the other a guitar, together they’ve got that whole “Husker Du meets My Bloody Valentine” thing going on, the volume of which inevitably transcending the fact that they’re, like, only two people.

They keep asking us to “give it up” for things- the other bands, this song, ourselves, being cool. When the latter is met with a muted response they go crazy- “what the fuck man? You guys aren’t cool?! Is that your thing in Brighton? I guess that’s cool.” Later on a t-shirt is offered to the first person in the crowd to surf it, but no-one does. Aside from the tedious Californian yabberings, the music they make is all right but too considered-in-a not-considered way, like a carefully tweaked “just got out of bed” haircut.

I’m not looking forward to Cardiff’s Los Campesinos. The prospect of a band that goes on about being twee evokes images of smug cardigan clad indie-haircutted neo-luddites who like to drink cups of tea and eat small cakes and live in a kind of ridiculous fantasy land of their own making listening to crap like Deerhoof.

The crowd don’t share my worries, the kids are here for Los Campesinos and they LOVE it. Crowd-surfing abounds- eat that No Age. In case you didn’t know, there’s about 100 people in the band, and they’re about half girls and half boys, and they have violins and things, and they make breathless earnest indie pop inspired by stuff from the “golden age” of indie, when people used cassettes and taped stuff off the radio and made fanzines and drank cups of tea.

They’re excited to be touring with the other bands, and they’re obviously really into music and what they’re doing. You get the feeling the members speak of Los Campesinos in hushed terms, as this entity that they are all part of and utterly dedicated to making a huge success. And yeah they’re not bad as these things go- it’s easy to see why the kids (around the world!) love it. Symphonic indie pop songs with something to believe in. Even International Tweexcore Underground doesn’t grate as I thought it might. By the end the guitarist has ripped off his Big Black t-shirt and is hugging the singer on the drum-stand who has just mentioned Kenickie in his spoken word monologue.

Time to party like it's 1995.