LIFE bring new track ‘Niceties’ and more to the Manchester leg of Jäger Curtain Call

This year, Jäger Curtain Call – the annual programme bringing you a new track and a special gig from a host of our favourite bands – has super-sized. Not content with just landing in London, we’re also taking it on the road to Glasgow and Manchester, and this week saw the triple-header kick off in style at the latter’s Night and Day Cafe.

With hanging decorations adorning the venue and a junior Gallagher child on the list (it is Manchester, after all), local boys The Starlight Magic Hour are first on. Channelling the lurching, teetering-on-the-edge-of-chaos grottiness of the Fat White Family, via a touch of The Pogues, the sextet are a gloriously chaotic proposition. The rest of the band may be dapperly suited, but singer Michael Cunningham – sporting a red velour tracksuit – is a careering tumble of hedonism. Clearly having taken some lessons from sadly departed Fall frontman Mark E. Smith’s school of stagecraft (the primary one being, you don’t always have to be on the stage or even looking at the audience if you don’t feel like it), the singer perches behind pillars, sprawls on the floor and generally lurches about like a man unencumbered by the trivialities of most. The songs are mostly good too – dark-hearted shanties that veer between romping hoe-downs and disturbing dirges.

Leeds boys Mush might be a tighter proposition but there’s a glint in their eyes, too. Like early Parquet Courts or, going further back, Television, the quartet deal in taught, interplaying guitars and playfully wonky melody, while curly-haired singer Daniel Hyndman has more than a whiff of Courts singer Andrew Savage’s vocal inflection to his own sometimes deadpan, sometimes exaggerated delivery. Though the influences are clear, however, there’s nothing derivative about this lot. From the cheeky lollop of ‘Gig Economy’ to idiosyncratic, Trump-baiting, eight-minute closer ‘Alternative Facts’, these are tracks full of nuance and smarts. Mush could be something quite special.