Live

Pulled Apart By Horses, Monotonix

Alex Nelson 05/09/2010

As Pulled Apart By Horses take to the purple, monolith like stage of this year's Offset Festival, singer Tom Hudson exclaims "hooray for good time keeping!" Indeed, due to a slightly overrunning set from Israeli loons Monotonix, and the obligatory time allocated to clear up the carnage left by the Tel Aviv punks' crazy fun show earlier in the day, Pulled Apart By Horses are slightly late to the stage. But rather than launch a Guns 'N' Roses style tirade against the state of British music promoters or anything like that, the band just get on with it, and deliver their now standard spectacular alive show.

Launching straight into habitué paramour 'E=MC Hammer', with its gargantuan closing riff and self-aggrandising vocal refrain, Pulled Apart By Horses' rock never lets up, combining good time libretto with crashing great disconsonant rawk riffs, and a hell of a lot of jumping around. After a behind tempo rendition of 'Back To The Fuck Yeah' comes latest single 'High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive', its lazily strummed chord intro giving way to a fast paced thrasher of a song about high fives and 'balls of fire'. Halfway through the song, the hurtling guitars take a breather; just enough time for guitarist James Brown to clamber to the top of the P.A, before the song picks itself back up again and comes in heavier than ever with an 'URRGH!'

'Get Off My Ghost Train' and 'Yeah Buddy' see the emergence of a large circle pit within the crowd, provoked by the band on stage, and Hudson disbands from his guitar, announces "this is my opportunity to see how many penises are in the crowd", and dives headlong into the moshpit for 'I've Got Guestlist To Rory O'Hara's Suicide'. He eventually makes his way back to the stage, but not before pausing to scream "enjoy your fucking misery!" in this reviewers face, and boshing himself on the head with the mic a few times.

To close, Pulled Apart By Horses bring out the obvious yet perfect choice of 'I Punched A Lion In The Throat'. Its semi-surrealist lyrics and its fragmented pentatonic riff coda (which seems to repeat itself ad nauseum, only adding to its 'ultimate power' as it goes) bring the feverish crowd to boiling point and over the edge. In a blaze of feedback and splashed water bottles, the band leave the stage, sticking religiously to time constrictions but allowing their brand of exuberant rock fun to shine and spill out over the edges. Pulled Apart By Horses, already one of my bands of the year, and quickly becoming one of my favourite bands of all time. And that's saying something.