With that note out of the way, on with the important stuff; the music. Minnaars immediately broke out into the excellent Busy Hands. Given that this is what I would consider a genuine dancefloor filler, that’s some statement of intent. Between the pulsating synth, delay-laden, staccato, dueling guitars and dynamic drums and baseline it would be difficult not to dance. The breakdown in the middle with the refrain “I’ve been falling into bits, been like this since the blitz” has always been something I’ve found hypnotically good. This was even more true live. The song has been reworked since it was last put on record and now has an extra bit at the end where a recording of the vocal line has been cut up and placed over new synth lines, before breaking out into an outro. It was a fantastic re-imagining of an already great song. Below is the original version of Busy Hands.

From there the band went on to play a mix of old songs and songs which have been written for their debut LP. This was their first gig since recording some of that album, but you wouldn’t know it from the performance. The band are nearly all extremely dynamic and charismatic performers. Special mention here has to go to the frontman and the two guitarists who were almost always doing something else, different, new, or unexpected. The new material all sounded very interesting, exploring a similar shouty, danceable guitar based area in a number of different ways.

The gig finished with an interesting new song (possibly just an intro for Are Lovers) which had 3 members of the band doing almost nothing but singing at the same time, all over the top of the drums, bass and synth. This led into the fantastic Are Lovers, before the band left having pleased at least a significant subsection of the crowd and it looked like they had fun along the way.

Hopefully their album will come out later this year. In the meantime I’ll make do with the compilation of their work to date “Of Our Delirious Former Loving Hours”.