Electrelane

It's four days later and I'm still trying to work out if there is a point to this band. My Bloody Valentine are rightly lauded as the doyennes for 90s noise rock. Band of Susans are criminally underrated exponents of the same genre. MBV featured one female. BoS were almost exclusively feminine - take out Page Hamilton and Robert Poss and you had a guitar toting toilet queue. In which case, how could four girls from Brighton copy what they did and yet manage to fuck it up? Answer: By being so criminally untalented, it's painful.

Untalented isn't necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who has seen Yes Boss or LostAlone will know that, sometimes, it can be hilarious. But Electrelane. They are so badly out of tune and so badly out of time that it actually hurts to listen to them. This was, basically, thirty minutes of chronically inept noisemaking.

The odd thing, though, is that there are some bands who sound good live and dreadful on record (The Young Knives, for example) and some bands who are pants but who sound great on disc (anyone heard of The Long Blondes?) and you just know that Electrelane fit into the latter group. Any half decent producer would make them sound good. So this is a warning, just in case you have one of their albums. Keep it that way, because seeing them live will only break your heart.