The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Normally only beloved of hoodlums wanting to legitimise mugging with a scream mask, this year the Halloween spirit has been embraced by the folks at ATP, who’ve organised a one-night-only fancy dress mini-festival at the Kentish Town Forum. Sadly, the long ticket queue means many miss the excellent Fuck Buttons. By the time Deerhunter take to the stage, however, the pit is packed with a gaggle of the sort of boys who’d move into Butlin’s if only they’d fire the Redcoats, keep the proles at bay with an electrified perimeter fence and ship in mercy flights of Dinosaur Jr. Unfortunately, disappointment reigns as Deerhunter are crippled by appalling sound, their fluid rhythms and eloquent noise rendered stodgy and flat.

Post-Deerhunter, teams change side as the serious sorts head to the bar and people who consider themselves above fancy dress peg it to the front for deeply fashionable retro garage rock combo, Black Lips. Wasn’t it but a few years ago that we had to suffer the embarrassment of The D4 and Datsuns doing something suspiciously similar to this? We did, but they were hairy bastards who didn’t wash and concentrated on the rock, rather than four handsome hipsters from Atlanta who clearly dig the roll. Apparently, I’m missing something, and Black Lips, with their lyrics equating girl trouble with that strong breeze that killed a load of black folks down in New Orleans, and habit of, like, sometimes doing crazy shit on stage, are terribly good fun. Tonight, they plod through a set that you could hear in any year from ’67 to the present, and no doubt, many more to come. Why, oh generously proportioned lady who’s come as a crone, will you not rid us from this blinkered retro curse?

If you’re going to lose yourself to the dumb, raw and naïve, you should hook yourself up with a copy of Liars new record. Tonight, they’re not on the mind-melting form that gave Field Day a mighty tentpole earlier this summer, but in terms of power and boundary-blasting lunacy, they’re among the greatest bands of the past five years. They unite this crowd because they take the best elements of the rest of the bill - the experimentalism of Deerhoof, the ballsy sauce of Black Lips, the groove and noise of Deerhunter - and do it better than the others. They’re professional but they never take themselves seriously and, even when they’re not firing on all cylinders, they’re still one of the best live bands around. And a damn hard act to follow…

So you want it to get weirder, right? Liars need following by some visceral, unpleasant noise to crown our Halloween and set us up for burning papists come November 5. Instead we get Bambi’s Fucking Trotter. If Black Lips are America at its most brash, Deerhoof are the nation’s leftfield at its most tedious. They make earnest music subsidised by cheap living and a cynicism bypass, their cutesy la-la vocals the sickly topping for songs that weave around the sexless jazzisms as if they’re trying to knit a cardigan for everyone who hasn’t already ’hoofed it into the chilly November night.